SharePoint Files in desktop/Windows Explorer solutions

[mdcastorena]

Good afternoon,

Our business is in the process of building an intranet/document management system in SharePoint and we're anticipating the push-back from users to be that they won't be able to browse, search and work with SharePoint files in the same fashion they can today with File Explorer and their shared drives. Has anyone employed vendors or paid for a product to bridge this gap? We do NOT want to go the OOTB route of Syncing or creating OneDrive shortcuts.

Any input is appreciated.

Thank you,
Morghan

[#2]

Hi @mdcastorena take a look at Zee Drive for mapping network drives to SharePoint Online it can help ease the transition for users from on-premises to the cloud. Zee Drive has the feel of a familiar network drive plus it has a number of productivity features/integrations available from the File Explorer context menu.

Myles

[#3]

As Myles said, ZeeDrive is a good tool. However it makes you have to migrate similar to your current network drives. With the addition of the new "Add Shortcut to OneDrive" really works nicely. So I would try to push that direction if at all possible to keep consistency with the new tools. Zee drive can cause confusion that there are files in SharePoint, but people will still say I saved it on the X drive, but not everyone has X Drive.

Anyway, if you are just doing a 1 to 1 dump of file structure, and everyone gets zee drive, then probably will work just fine. But having Zee Drive will not get them using any new features of the Cloud storage as it mainly hides everything into the same look and feel of a network drive.

Also, there are limitations to file amounts etc. when using sync, that zeedrive doesn't have, so if you have larger volume of files (over 300k) then zeedrive could be a plus too.

[#4]

Thank you both. @ChrisWebb, Zee Drive is still having you utilize a server just like a shared drive, correct? So at the end of the day, it's not really moving to a cloud environment, right?

[#5]

ZeeDrive maps a SharePoint Library / Folder to a Network Drive. So your files are still in the cloud (SharePoint) but to the use, it looks just like the same network drive they always wanted.

I had to use it for our Finance group because they had a large number of "Linked Excel Files" hard coded to our Network S: Drive, so ZeeDrive was the solution. We moved those folders over to a library, same structure, and created a mapped S: Drive. Their computers don't know any difference, nor does it work any different than a network drive.

You don't get the 'Share' and 'Open in browser' context menu's you get with OneDrive sync, with ZeeDrive etc. There are a couple new context menu things for coauthoring etc. but nothing crazy. I prefer OneDrive sync with the shortcuts cause you get all the features, but if you got stubborn users that refuse to change and or linked file issues preventing a move, then zee drive is way to go. Also Zee Drive can handle larger document libraries, with sync you can only have 300k supported synced files at a given time in your local sync.