Background:
- At work we use MS Office, because who doesn’t. We used to have a central file server with lots of well sorted directories.
- Then Corporate decided to ditch that, everything must move into OneDrive so there’s always a Data Owner.
- The local boss had to move everything from the network share into his own OneDrive, and then share, with each of us, the folders that were relevant to each of us.
- This sounds like distributed storage, which is probably smart in some way.
In reality, it’s shit. Everything is now a link to “corporateName.sharepoint.com” in the browser, and it’s a hassle to find that in the file explorer. SOmeone just shared a folder with me. I see it in my browser. How do I get it from the browser into a normal folder view? Should I forget about on-disk storage; is everything today just a browser bookmark?
Worse, I have no idea what’s where. Some people share some stuff and somehow it ends up in my OneDrive, but what’s the context of it?
This seems so wrong to me. Am I just not “getting” it??
It. Is. The. Worst.
Someone shares a file directly, another shares the whole folder, someone else makes a Team, which automatically creates its own sharepoint site that has its own document library. Now someone else shares a file via a Community sharepoint site they have, which is somehow different than a Teams site. The Community site also has its own document library.
Oh and sharepoint is also onedrive? But also isn’t, somehow. I never know. I can sync some stuff to one onedrive folder, and some to another onedrive folder. But it’s all also the same.
To answer your question, you are not alone.
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OneDrive is really just an alias for a networked drive that points to a cloud location and is baked into every instance of Windows. Most OneDrive instances are for personal computers and they’re inaccessible to everyoen else. But you can manually share files.
SharePoint is a flexible enterprise website and fileserver for an organization to customize.
Teams is a Slack ripoff that allows employees to create teams with channels within those teams, and freeform chats. It also has a filesharing component to it.
It is awful to work around the half-dozen ways to store and share files. Really. Microsoft needs to unfuck this.
Teams isn’t JUST a Slack ripoff. It’s a Slack spinoff, to the point they share assets in AppData.
Which means that if you install both and then uninstall one or the other… well… let’s just say I spent a while on manual cleanup and then never reinstalled either.
I’m pretty sure in an Enterprise Environment OneDrive is just a SharePoint Frontend.
OneDrive is for personal files you occasionally want to collab on. Sharepoint is for collaborative files you want occasionally restrict. They have opposite purposes and are tooled around those purposes.
Both are sitting on the same hardware and have very similar underpinnings, but their front ends serve two distinct purposes.
So are the files in Teams on SharePoint? And searchable through SharePoint?
If I search keywords in OneDrive vs the same search in SharePoint. Would it give different results? Or would it search everything I’m allowed to see anyway?
The difference between one drive and SharePoint is their intended use, nothing physical.
A lot of your frustrations are stemming from your M365 environment being misconfigured. While all that is possible behavior, in a well-configured environment it makes sense and works well. It sounds like many of the features that are open there should in reality be restricted in order to allow a better user experience as much of that function is unneeded by your particular group.
This is definitely true. My M365 environment has a huge number of users, and the admins have no idea what they’re doing. It’s a big mess. But that’s a red flag imo, such a massive and widely used platform should be more consistent in how they name things and how their features interact.
A lot of that comes down to training. Not every product can be boiled down to phone app simplicity. I mean that being said though, I do think Sharepoint could use a much clearer interface overall. I think MS is working on the consistency part but with so many moving parts it feels chaotic at times. But I’ve seen things becoming clearer and more cohesive over the last few years. It’s still light years ahead of a platform like GCP though. That thing is a nightmare in digital.
This constant bundling is crazy for actually finding things. Always like four places to check.
The problem is that your files are in OneDrive instead of SharePoint. OneDrive is for personal files that you occasionally want to collab with others on. SharePoint is for collaborative files that you occasionally want to restrict.
One is meant to be closed most of the time, the other open most of the time. And the way sharing and other features work within the tends to reflect that charactistic.
Your team files need to be in a SharePoint library. It is possible to have a direct link in the file explorer to the SharePoint files and run everything as if it is a local file server. MS is seemingly trying to move away from that and keeping the browser open to the document library has mostly the same functionality with some minorly different steps.
But it sounds to me like your IT dept doesn’t have enough experience with M365 to know how to handle this properly.
Wait until Corporate sees the new data storage rates for 365 for next year and their potential new bill for cloud storage.
They’ll be spinning up those server room file servers in no time.
Are there any details known already?
Yes, our 365 team got estimates from Microsoft about 3 weeks ago.
If we don’t cull our usage before next August, our renewal will be £10m more than this year… That’s for 50,000 accounts and a whole lotta SharePoint.
Wow, damn. Around 90k accounts here with a lot of extra storage. I’ll need to check that as well then so there’s still some time left.
May I ask how much additional storage you have for the Tenant, roughly? What is the price increase in percentage for the additional storage?
Working in IT, I understand the frustration.
There’s a couple ways to do it, but you can add SharePoint to your OneDrive on your PC, it shows up basically the same as any of your OneDrive files in Explorer.
Apparently there’s a way to map it to a drive letter as well, but it gets complex pretty quickly and as far as I know, you need to get the link to paste into the mapped drive dialog from the object owner… I might be wrong here.
Google it. You’ll improve your life so much.
As an IT person, I was going to suggest this too. Glad you brought it up first.
Hello fellow IT Patsy. I hope you’re having an uneventful day.
I’m not going to pretend that it works great but it sounds to me like you need to know how it works a little better
Heh, if only I were in a position to change anything. Maybe bosmang should be smarter, and move it from OneDrive to SharePoint. Who gonna explain it to him?
If you do a little research and figure out how to get it setup you can share that knowledge with your boss. There are SOME things that could depend on how IT or the SharePoint owner configured things - like at my job there’s one SharePoint where they turned off linking it in my OneDrive - but otherwise you should be able to get it close to how it used to be.
It’s definitely silly for your boss to keep it all in his onedrive and sharing it out. OneDrive is supposed to be personal storage that you CAN collaborate on. SharePoint and Teams (basically SharePoint on the back end) are where team-wide storage should be. But, having gone through a transition to M365 I understand they probably just don’t understand and did what they thought they could.
Yeah by default, all sharepoint at my work can’t be mapped to a regular folder, so I’m stuck with having to make shortcuts to everything. And there’s so many, effectively means that my browser has loads of links open, and when I reboot the laptop, first thing I now do is to restore history to get them all back. Hate it.
You can add a second OneDrive to your local folders. Right click the little cloud icon, navigate to your account details and add an account from there.
I added my orgs Sharepoint so that I could see everything locally without all the palaver.
Considering my personal onedrive wants to share everything I share with write permissions to the general public I’ve had a different experiance. But I certainly understand your point.
That - good sir - is a very valid argument
We use SharePoint and everything just shows up on my desktop computer as a drive like it always did before when it was on a local server. Works really well.
Until the directory structure and filename, including your SharePoint hostname, exceeds 400 characters and then it just breaks. Because, Microsoft.
Surprisingly easy to do with some quite nested folders with spaces in the names (as that takes 3 characters per space) and a long filename.
Does it show up as a local drive or a network drive?
How do I get it from the browser into a normal folder view?
There’s a setting which the sharepoint admins can set which allows Windows Explorer view.
To access https://sharepoint.company.com/team_a what you’ll do is open windows Explorer and navigate to “\\sharepoint.company.com\team_a” (starts with double back slash, without the quotes)… You can even map it as a network drive on your system, so you can have an X: drive which maps to that same location and you can use it like a normal shared drive…
Edit: I take back my comment. This method doesn’t work anymore, except for pre-SharePoint 2019 on-prem environments…
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My guess is that the problem is it is cheaper to implement in SharePoint than to teach the company to do it with files and enforce policy. A lot of people don’t know how computers work.
Hmmm do we work for the same company?.. or are all the big ones doing this?
I sincerely hope for your sake we’re not in the same boat. This one ain’t fine.
You kind of are. All large corporations have similar annoyances, but slightly different people and technologies. After a while (maybe 20 years of working for 10 different corps) it feels like you have seen it all, and it’s just mediocre crap everywhere.
