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.
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.
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 £1m more than this year… That’s for 70,000 accounts and a whole lotta SharePoint.
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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