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??
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.
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.
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.
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.