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??

  • @JigglySackles
    32•1 year ago

    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.