SharePoint Online as a File Server
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We're thinking of decommissioning our Win 2008R2 file servers and migrating our files to Office 365 Sharepoint Online. We have business premium licenses so we want to take advantage of this service since it won't be at an extra cost. What are the limitations of using SharePoint Online as a file server? Are videos, adobe illustrator, various graphics files, PowerPoint files supported? Can you save QuickBooks project files? Is there a limit on the number of folders and files we can host cause we have a bunch? Do we have to worry about SharePoint iterations and revisions breaking stuff? What's the migration time and user training involved? We're looking at migrating close to 15000 files of different sizes. Looking to understand the limitations and problems since this will be a very big move for us.
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@jblaze said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
We're thinking of decommissioning our Win 2008R2 file servers and migrating our files to Office 365 Sharepoint Online. We have business premium licenses so we want to take advantage of this service since it won't be at an extra cost. What are the limitations of using SharePoint Online as a file server? Are videos, adobe illustrator, various graphics files, PowerPoint files supported? Can you save QuickBooks project files? Is there a limit on the number of folders and files we can host cause we have a bunch? Do we have to worry about SharePoint iterations and revisions breaking stuff? What's the migration time and user training involved? We're looking at migrating close to 15000 files of different sizes. Looking to understand the limitations and problems since this will be a very big move for us.
It is good to take advantage of your Office 365 Licenses that you pay for. That said there is limitation on how you access it and what you can store.
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Quickbook Projects Files and Company files are not supported, not because it cannot be stored but it won't work on the application.
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Yes, videos, adobe illustrator, various graphics files, PowerPoint files are supported.
Please see the limits of Sharepoint below:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt842345.aspx
.Webdav is very limited also on Sharepoint. I would say that getting used to it will take some time just because of how changes affect people.
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Ugh - Sharepoint of QB? Forget it (IMO)
Go with a local NAS with remote backup to something like Backblaze or such...
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@jblaze I've been on Dropbox enterprise for one year... and now we are back to traditional SMB shares (latest SMB 3 with encryption etc, but still SMB).
For us it didn't work well. If you have a big amount of files (over 100Gb of active stuff), in my opinion it's not gonna work.
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I've been a great fan of the idea of lanless-SaaS everything, but for most of the environment it would simply not work. A great clustered SMB share, with branchecache etc will do the job better than everything else, if your stuff is massive.
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@dbeato Hi dbeato! I actually run into this list of limitations. Though it is helpful, not sure how to quantify this in relation to our environment. Granted, changes do affect people. We're not looking to take advantage of something solely because it is available. We're looking for a value add not just a cheap option. Can you speak on the migration time and user training involved? Also things like the 5000 item limit threshold
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@francesco-provino 100GB alone is Graphics Files. About 250GB is just PST backups. For everything, I'd say we need 1.5 - 2TB of space. JPG, ZIP, AI, and PPT are in the 30GBs each.
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@jblaze You backup your pst files to the same systems as the email servers? You might as well backup the pst files directly onto the Exchange server in house.
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@jblaze said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@dbeato Hi dbeato! I actually run into this list of limitations. Though it is helpful, not sure how to quantify this in relation to our environment. Granted, changes do affect people. We're not looking to take advantage of something solely because it is available. We're looking for a value add not just a cheap option. Can you speak on the migration time and user training involved? Also things like the 5000 item limit threshold
Migration is tricky as you need to make sure you don't have special characters as they will not be synced. Also you need to plan for OneDrive per user files and then Sharepoint for the Shared files and make sure the security permissions are assigned properly.
The 5,000 item limit is for WebDav and the OneDrive CLient which will have trouble with more files than that. -
Anyone here know of a company that completely ditched local fileshares and moved wholly to ODfB and Sharepoint?
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@dashrender said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
Anyone here know of a company that completely ditched local fileshares and moved wholly to ODfB and Sharepoint?
We had two customers that did that, and they regretted it. That's because I know it first hand. I have a lot of customers with Dropbox and NextCloud.
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@dashrender said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
Anyone here know of a company that completely ditched local fileshares and moved wholly to ODfB and Sharepoint?
We wanted to but it wasn't good. We went to Nextcloud instead, which is way more enterprise than ODfB.
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@dashrender said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
Anyone here know of a company that completely ditched local fileshares and moved wholly to ODfB and Sharepoint?
Right now, I use a combination of Windows or Linux file servers for common shares and Nextcloud for users data only.
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@jblaze no way with more than 1Tb of litlle files.
The dropbox client at startup can get a modern i5 with a good ssd to it’s knee at every user login.
The smart sync feature looks useful, but many software doesn’t work giod with that. Either, re-sync a big file often can be painful for your wan connection.
You can drop smart sync but then you need 1-2 tb of good storage PER CLIENT to match the performance of a simple fileserver… -
Is anybody in the world happy with Sharepoint Online or OneDrive for Business?
I cant think of two worse 'solutions' for file storage/sharing. -
@momurda said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
Is anybody in the world happy with Sharepoint Online or OneDrive for Business?
I cant think of two worse 'solutions' for file storage/sharing.Not of which I am aware. I like Sharepoint conceptually, but not in practice.
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@nerdydad said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@jblaze You backup your pst files to the same systems as the email servers? You might as well backup the pst files directly onto the Exchange server in house.
They're actually saved locally in our Archive Server, just weighing options on using SharePoint online and ditching the infrastructure.
@scottalanmiller said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@momurda said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
Is anybody in the world happy with Sharepoint Online or OneDrive for Business?
I cant think of two worse 'solutions' for file storage/sharing.Not of which I am aware. I like Sharepoint conceptually, but not in practice.
My thoughts exactly. In concept, it's a great idea until you look at the planning, execution, and maintenance of the service by the end-user. It seems like a mixed bag of experiences wavering on "it's ok" or "it isn't good" dependent on people's environment.
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@jblaze said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@scottalanmiller said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@momurda said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
Is anybody in the world happy with Sharepoint Online or OneDrive for Business?
I cant think of two worse 'solutions' for file storage/sharing.Not of which I am aware. I like Sharepoint conceptually, but not in practice.
My thoughts exactly. In concept, it's a great idea until you look at the planning, execution, and maintenance of the service by the end-user. It seems like a mixed bag of experiences wavering on "it's ok" or "it isn't good" dependent on people's environment.
If you have nothing but IT people using it, or someone who is dedicated to managing it, it might be okay. But the platform is bloated, slow, and expensive even when working great. And it almost never is. People just start using it like a big shared folder and it all falls apart.
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@scottalanmiller said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@jblaze said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@scottalanmiller said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@momurda said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
Is anybody in the world happy with Sharepoint Online or OneDrive for Business?
I cant think of two worse 'solutions' for file storage/sharing.Not of which I am aware. I like Sharepoint conceptually, but not in practice.
My thoughts exactly. In concept, it's a great idea until you look at the planning, execution, and maintenance of the service by the end-user. It seems like a mixed bag of experiences wavering on "it's ok" or "it isn't good" dependent on people's environment.
If you have nothing but IT people using it, or someone who is dedicated to managing it, it might be okay. But the platform is bloated, slow, and expensive even when working great. And it almost never is. People just start using it like a big shared folder and it all falls apart.
Yea, but you can have 500,000 site collections per tenant! The best part about that, I dont even know anybody that knows what a site collection is.
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@momurda said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@scottalanmiller said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@jblaze said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@scottalanmiller said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
@momurda said in SharePoint Online as a File Server:
Is anybody in the world happy with Sharepoint Online or OneDrive for Business?
I cant think of two worse 'solutions' for file storage/sharing.Not of which I am aware. I like Sharepoint conceptually, but not in practice.
My thoughts exactly. In concept, it's a great idea until you look at the planning, execution, and maintenance of the service by the end-user. It seems like a mixed bag of experiences wavering on "it's ok" or "it isn't good" dependent on people's environment.
If you have nothing but IT people using it, or someone who is dedicated to managing it, it might be okay. But the platform is bloated, slow, and expensive even when working great. And it almost never is. People just start using it like a big shared folder and it all falls apart.
Yea, but you can have 500,000 site collections per tenant! The best part about that, I dont even know anybody that knows what a site collection is.
It means a group of Sharepoint SItes under one main Sharepoint site. Also make sure to enable recycle bin for all your Sharepoint Sites, otherwise recovery is a pain.
