Sharepoint as a fileshare

[Dave Hawkey]

Hi,

I have a customer who saves everything on Sharepoint.  They have drives mapped to the Sharepoint folders for easy access, which for the most part works fine, except that they have to reauthenticate to SharePoint every few days.  Easily done with a shortcut and saved credentials, but still a little bit annoying.  Researching a way to do it, I've found loads of forums, and Microsoft themselves suggesting the better way is to sync folders.  I don't understand how this is an accepted solution?  What if I have a Surface Pro with 128GB SSD, and about 600GB on sharepoint.  Syncing is not an option.  User experience I want is to easily open a document in the native application (not an online version), be able to hit save and trust that it will save back to the right place.  Does anyone have a solution for this scenario, using Microsoft cloud options?  ie:  no local file server, and no 3rd party apps.  Seems bizarre to me that Microsoft are moving away from mapped drives.  The technology works, they just need to fix the issue of reauthenticating all the time.       

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Can completely understand your concern and this topic isn't uncommon. I'd like to first speak to mapping the network drives with SharePoint. While this has been the mechanism for many years, there are a lot of issues using WebDAV.

1. It's not the best performing process, as the requests are extremely verbose.
2. WebDAV connections are extremely inconsistent and they can/will disconnect at random intervals.
3. WebDav has some security issues
4. WebDAV has poor large file support.

I'd like to next talk about the use of SharePoint as a file share. SharePoint is not a replacement for a file share. SharePoint is a great place for collaboration, workflow and document life cycle management. With that being said, lots of companies still try to use it in that manner.

The recommendation is to sync folders using the One Drive for Business Sync Client. The reason for this is, it supports larger files, you won't have those credential disconnect issues.

If your concern is overall file space that is being taken up on your machines, as per example of a 600GB file share on a 128GB drive, I suggest taking a look at Files on Demand. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-onedrive-files-on-demand-in-windows-0e6860d3-d9f3-4971-...

Files on demand allow your users to see all of the files in the file share in their local One Drive file system, but without the need to download them until they are required to be opened.