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Most projects I do are focused on cloud native. However, customers are not always ready or need more time to move their data to the cloud. So we almost always have a hybrid situation where we need drive mappings for example. I would rather not have those, but this is the reality. Will there be any support from Intune on creating drive mappings of printer mappings? Or will there never be any support for those because of the cloud focus of the product and we need to solve that hurdle by using scripts or 3rd party tooling?
- Jason_Sandys
Microsoft
This is ultimately a bit of a soapbox for me, but I'd like to stress here that accessing on-prem file shares is different from mapping drives. Mapping drives is in no way required for users to access a UNC path. There are many alternate and (arguably) better ways for users to access UNCs including common methods that users are already fully versed with and use much more frequently as they browse the web including shortcuts and favorites. Forced and micro-managed drive mappings are not the best way ultimately -- yes, this is somewhat subjective, but most folks have never tried anything else so they simply fall back on "this is the way we've always done it" instead of actually evaluating the possibilities. As noted, a bit of a soapbox, but the reality is that the work environment is changing and so much the paradigms that users use.- You are absolutely not wrong on any point, but we have to remember that telling a user to click the "Shortcut to Shared Folder Blah" icon on their desktop instead of opening the "S:" drive like they've done every day for 20 years is a big shift. It's generally not the IT folks who care about whether it's a drive letter or a UNC path (unless some awful legacy app requires it) but making huge changes in the user experience generates complaints and makes our lives harder. I see both sides here and completely understand what it's like to be told "Just make the drive letter work" by upper management.
- Jason_SandysI don't agree that this is a big shift for users though. They use favorites all day long along with web indexes/pages of links (like your organization's intranet homepage) to get to various web sites all day long. Thus, adding a handful of links, or better yet, using DFS so there's just one link won't be a big shift at all. Is it a shift? Yes? Can it be managed? Yes, I've seen it work before and have even implemented it.
- Can you name a few alternatives for the people searching for this? And yup it is a temporary solution that users know already. If you introduce something else you also have to think about adoption. Especially when things are temporary, that is also something to consider.
- Jason_SandysMy initial go to here is to always recommend using DFS (along with ABE). This gives you a single tree of all shared folders within the environment. From this, at most, users can map a single drive letter or use a single shortcut or favorite to get to everything that they have access to file share-wise. I've been recommending orgs do this for 15 years so it's not something new for the cloud-native era.
