Migrating Shared Drives : Sharepoint or OneDrive

[Franky5555]

Hello,

The situation: several hundreds shared drives which are automatically created based on information in a Project Management System (think of a project with a name and list of employees working on it).

Only the employees working on the project can have access to folder associated to the project.
All employees have same access rights then : write access

Access rights to folder are sync with the project staffing

As the company is migrating to Office 365 we needs to replicate that mechanism whereby when a new project is created a space to manage the project documents shall be created

Users are used to accessing the documents through the windows explorer and they want to keep it like it. There is no metadata associated to the files. project folders can contains up to several hundreds MB of data.

I understand onedrive is a personal drive but can be used to share documents to others. I also hear that the folder is owned by an employee, which is not the case in the use case described above.

On the other side SharePoint can seems to be overkill as the users do not care about metadata and web access.

The ability to edit concurrently a document is required.

So, SharePoint or OneDrive as the target solution?

Thanks,

Frank

[#2]

Office 365 groups

It uses Sharepoint

and this statement

On the other side SharePoint can seems to be overkill as the users do not care about metadata and web access.

If that is how they think, then they do not understand what it is and why it makes sense to use it. I am guessing they save a file, and the name of the file should tell everyone in the company what that file is about, without ever looking at it. 

[#3]

@Franky5555 

Are you just doing Microsoft 365 without the Project Online licenses? Project Online sounds like the optimal solution for what you are asking.

If not, I would suggest that if you are wanting a document repository, use SharePoint Online. While there are some creative ways of using the file explorer to access SharePoint Online, you will have it available through the Microsoft 365 Apps via the SharePoint linking available.

Just some of my thoughts off the top of my head. I would really sit down with your end users and get a list of what features they want to keep and what they cannot live without. That will help you define which way you will go.

[#4]

Thanks David. The idea is to move to a cloud based solution w/out changing the way users manage their files first, then gradually expose them to SharePoint capabilities

[#5]

Thanks Shaun. The requirement is to have a document repository. Thanks for your message

[#6]

Sounds good, but the biggest mistake people do is move to Office 365 and think they will keep things exactly how they had it before they moved. You cannot make the products you get work how you want to do it. You need to understand how things work and then adapt to it. I can say that I started supporting customers on office 365 since 2011, and one of the biggest frustrations is when you try to make the products do something it was not designed to do. For example, when the customer is coming from a NAS drive or some type of OnPrem Storage and then they move all there data to 365 and think its the same when its 100% not the same. You cannot treat SharePoint/OneDrive as a NTFS NAS drive. You will be terribly upset as it does not work that way. Another Example is, on your OnPrem storage, you have all the Files/Folders in a single drive and as you go down you edit the permission on the folders on who can access it and who cannot. and you just keep going down the line editing the permissions to each folder/File. That is not how you do it in 365. So, if you keep the mindset of "we want to move all the data to the cloud and not change anything, and then gradually expose them. P.S, not sure what you mean by "Gradually expose them to SharePoint", SharePoint is the only way to store files in 365. So, you will need to know how SharePoint works before you migrate your data over.

You should do the research on what you get with 365 and I would say that 99% of the time, you will find a better way to do processes you use to do before and most of that time, you will find that the new way is so much better then the old way you use to do it.

And I am only telling you this as I have been supporting customers sinec 2011 and now work at Microsoft doing support ,and we see it each and every day. So, Just trying to set your expaction as you will run into issues if you do it how you said.

[#7]

@David_Petree I will completely agree with you on your point. People have always been on Microsoft when they cannot use the software as they wish it to be done (No one says that about Apple products, they just use it how Apple designs it). It is probably the greatest frustration I have had to deal with when dealing with adoption of Microsoft 365. I've had to come up with creative solutions to keep the status quo when migrating to OneDrive for Business. It also does not help when 3rd party vendors that your organization relies upon do not play well with M365.

We have to do a better job of setting the expectations of our "customers" when it comes to migration and really drive adoption of how Microsoft 365 wants the organization to use their collaboration tools. SharePoint Online is HUGE and if the organization is not ready for that, it will make adoption that much harder.

@Franky5555 just make sure to advertise, advocate, and educate your organization as you migrate them to SharePoint Online. It will help you in the long run.