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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I’m pretty sure in an Enterprise Environment OneDrive is just a SharePoint Frontend.
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.
The difference between one drive and SharePoint is their intended use, nothing physical.
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.
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.
Your boss did this not the best way*. They should have created a SharePoint site, maybe a few extra document libraries within that site, and have the files in there. Then added people as members to the site, maybe lock down a few of the document libraries/folders as required to specific people.
Then for ease of use people can open the libraries and click the sync button. Although if you have too many it’ll slow down/break.
OneDrive/SharePoint is not a drop in replacement for a file server, and those honestly still find their use, but a lot of places with a bit of re-structuring can work just as well if not better through SharePoint . Especially if they put in the effort to start using other SharePoint features.
Exactly! If it’s a small company, it may be an option to make a Teams everyone has access to and adapting the SharePoint behind it as the home page for the company, with different libraries depending on who needs access. At my company there is constant confusion between the SharePointsites the IT team set up for them and the SharePointsite behind their Teams, makes me think it is probably better to just use the SharePoint that’s forced on you by creating a Teams.
Can I view sharepoint in the file explorer, or is that only in the browser?
Once the SharePoint site is set up, your team should then sync the directory
This allows for ‘local’ file browsing. Works very well and keeps my entire team in sync. I’ve never had any major issues with this setup. I also make sure to set important files that I work on regularly to "always keep on this device’ (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/save-disk-space-with-onedrive-files-on-demand-for-windows-0e6860d3-d9f3-4971-b321-7092438fb38e)
The sharepoint itself - browser only
The document libraries (the sections of a sharepoint site that store files)* - there is a “sync” button you can press to get them into the OneDrive client on your PC, and therefore into file explorer. (It’s also possible for admins to automate this)
You could with the old SharePoint, but they took that feature away. The way around it is to open the SharePoint link in Edge, then bottom left “Return to classic SharePoint”, then Edge settings > Launch in Internet Explorer mode. After that you should now have a SP tab called library (you may need to click around the SP ribbon for it to appear) and in that tab should be “Open in File Explorer”.
I tried this and failed: I don’t see any controls in the bottom left, also no “Return to classic SharePoint” elsewhere. I guess the admins have turned that off.
I did find an option “Add lnk to OneDrive” which I clicked. Nothing happened in the browser, but I now do see that folder in Windows Explorer > OneDrive. So, yay, that works.
Now I just have this rando folder at the top level of my OneDrive. I have moved into a subfolder that makes sense to me, and I hope that doesn’t break anything. Edit: well, it breaks my harddrive :-( because it fucking downloads the entire folder contents onto my disk. I didn’t ask for that; that’s what network storage is for! Oh right, they killed that.
SharePoint and OneDrive folders can be synced locally. You get a local copy of the folder in online mode, so files are only downloaded if you specify, or if you open them.
Once you get that sorted out, you can stop worrying about where the file lives.
SharePoint and OneDrive folders can be synced locally.
yea, right…have tried that and the next day all the coworkers complained why am I creating hundreds of duplicate files.
After this has happened the second time (and ofc all the M$ experts had no clue, no, this can never happen…), I just won’t touch this Onedrive anymore. Ever.
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.
Yeah. 100% missing it. Having owners as well as the ability to set labels and restrictions is an incredibly important part of keeping data sensitive.
Get them in explorer following https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/view-sharepoint-files-in-file-explorer-66b574bb-08b4-46b6-a6a0-435fd98194cc
And you don’t need SharePoint for that
No but rarely are the labor hours spent to do it correctly. The same with foss, implementations is expensive most of the time and that’s why you pay someone to do it for you.
SharePoint concept and implementation is awful though. Better have different tools for the different tasks and track different types of artifacts and documents, than using SharePoint. And everything else in normal file system.
SharePoint is the typical mammoth that does everything and it does each thing extremely badly. But it’s Microsoft, so all companies must use it
Very much disagree. MS is better than what 98% of people will implement themselves.
You don’t need to reimplement SharePoint, just to use different processes and tools.
That said, if you are happy, that’s absolutely fine. I luckily don’t use it. It’s there, someone try to put there some document because “we paid millions for it” (I don’t know if they really did…), after a few frustrating loop of the crappy check in/check out broken system most people give up. I don’t even need to complain. It’s sufficient to wait a couple of weeks and someone else will, no one will find any benefit, and at the end it will be completely dropped again. Until someone remember how much we paid for it, and will try again.
I call it “the cycle of corporate hype”
You just keep handwaivng away costs. Using other tools costs money. Using SharePoint in you m365 subscription for all intent and purposes is free cause you sure as hell are paying for office.
I don’t care of the cost, people who push it do. They waste money in a million of way in consultants and tools and servers and concepts and process architecture and PI and stuff I have no idea. I am sure some mckinsey, KPMG, accenture, Gartner, ibm consultant knows why everything useless is so expensive. I usually don’t care. 9/10 of the money spent by my company is wasted, but somehow they manages to do profit. As every corporations. Which is fine. We have been doing cost cutting for few years now, still the amount of money wasted is crazy
Sharepoint is actually very well made. It has great versatility and extensibility. The issue that you and others run into that leads to the assumption that sharepoint is bad, is that it was deployed by inexperienced or potentially incompetent people. Most of the time it’s just inexperienced people that aren’t given the time to properly train for a deployment and are told to basically wing it because “there’s no money to train you how to do it right” or other bs cheapskate business excuse.
In my company they paid a lot of money for it, like too much. Simply very few people like it. Mainly paper work people with zero technical skills (those who prints documents to sign, stamp, and rescan them).
Because they paid so much for it, they always try to convince people to use it… Currently we are using it as a glorified s3 bucket for PowerPoint presentations to link them on confluence… But there is always someone who tries from time to time to push it, before it miserably fails again.
That’s my experience. I am sure someone finds it very useful.
See in the case of those people their workflow wasn’t taken into consideration before adoption. It’s definitely not a fit for everyone. But that amount of paper waste is insane. If the docs are already digital, then the signatures and stamps should be digital as well. If the docs are all hardcopies, then sharepoint shouldn’t have been used except as an upload point.
This seems so wrong to me. Am I just not “getting” it??
You are right. It is all chicken shit.
If you still use the desktop versions of MS Office, you can use the ‘favorites’ feature inside each program, for some files at least, to avoid the ugly URLs
Or, what I even prefer, ‘pin’ some files to your task bar.
I’m sure everyone working in office 365 has this problem to some degree. My (pessimistic) guess is that Microsoft is aware of these problems and in stead of solving them in SharePoint itself, they create more programs to help organising. Like now you can find your files through Bing connected to your workspace (which is just to try and get people to use bing?). There is also delve and such that shows you what you last worked on regardless of its location. And soon we will have the AI co-pilot, which I’m expecting will make things even worse since it will grab anything you have access to and not bother with original context. I don’t know what the endgame is here, maybe make people and companies dependent on these kinds of programs?
You’re perfectly right. But those who decide, sales or decision makes, don’t understand that. So it’s easy to sell them some shitty thing and empty promises. They trust another salesman a lot more than their own tech guys anyway.
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.
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.
In SharePoint: Add shortcut to OneDrive In OneDrive: tell it if, or how, to save the folders locally.
Use File Explorer, like I think you’d prefer.
It does not work perfectly.
And it freaks the fuck out if that folder name exists. Like if you have a documents folder in a project’s sharedrive, you can’t add it to yours because documents exists.
The “add shortcut to onedrive” option defaults to your root onedrive, and doesn’t differentiate what the original one drive name was.
I didn’t see an option to change where the shortcut is made, it just defaults to root. You can manually move the shortcut after it is created though. But this was a pain last time I tried it.
Same with mapping a teams group shared folder. We have a teams for each project, and a resources folder in that. It is a pain to open teams, so I tried mapping it to my one drive where I already have a folder for each project. So you go to teams, “add shortcut to onedrive”, go to your one drive folder and drag that shortcut to the appropriate folder, then repeat. Oh but project 3 is named differently and that folder name already exists in your one drive, here is some vague error. Ok, rename what I have in my onedrive, try to add the shortcut again, move shortcut, rename the file in my onedrive root back to what it was.
That dialog should just ask for a export location.
Using MS Teams for class is the worst… I do not know most of the time where the files in those assignments’ turn-in will end up.
We use it at work and send pics attached and I never know where to find these pictures again other than scrolling through messages. Apparently they’re saved somewhere because I often get warnings that attachments “already exist” due to having the same filenames. We often hop around to different shared PCs and OneDrive has the lovely effect of duplicating desktop shortcuts along with not transferring the icon images to each PC so they’re all the same generic shortcut icon.
Click on the files tab. It’s right there.
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?
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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Well that’s sad…
I could not make this work; I think the other commenters are right, this does not work.
Serious answer. You are getting it. Who decided to set up your processes and system doesn’t do daily business neither understand of computer.
I am sorry. Best option for you is to search a place better managed. Alternatively accept the loss of productivity. And go on. All your company is going to be less productive anyway.
