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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
