Solved Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter
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@carnival-boy said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
I've tried to give up mapped drives and move away from a traditional file server to OD4B and Sharepoint, but ultimately I prefer the speed and convenience of mapped drives to a local file server, as do 99% of users. I just don't like OD4B/SP.
That's a lot of changes at once. That's testing local mapped drives versus remote alternative. But local modern might be better than either. You issue with performance isn't fixed by being mapped but by being local.
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@scottalanmiller said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
@carnival-boy said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
I've tried to give up mapped drives and move away from a traditional file server to OD4B and Sharepoint, but ultimately I prefer the speed and convenience of mapped drives to a local file server, as do 99% of users. I just don't like OD4B/SP.
That's a lot of changes at once. That's testing local mapped drives versus remote alternative. But local modern might be better than either. You issue with performance isn't fixed by being mapped but by being local.
So what's the solution? Sync clients? /sigh - man I just hate that idea.
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@dashrender said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
@scottalanmiller said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
@carnival-boy said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
I've tried to give up mapped drives and move away from a traditional file server to OD4B and Sharepoint, but ultimately I prefer the speed and convenience of mapped drives to a local file server, as do 99% of users. I just don't like OD4B/SP.
That's a lot of changes at once. That's testing local mapped drives versus remote alternative. But local modern might be better than either. You issue with performance isn't fixed by being mapped but by being local.
So what's the solution? Sync clients? /sigh - man I just hate that idea.
That's "a" solution, yes. But not the natural one. The starting points for testing would be testing local vs. remote; and network file server vs. alternative separately to determine which pieces are the problems and which are not. Maybe both are, maybe just one.
It's like any testing scenarios. You need to change only one piece at a time if you want to determine what's wrong.
He mentioned specifically the speed of mapped drives, but mapped drives aren't faster. They are only associated with speed because they are so often local - specifically because they are so slow when remote. Mapped drives are actually generally the slower technology. It's just so tremendously slow over a WAN that people discount it as even being viable.
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@scottalanmiller said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
They are only associated with speed because they are so often local - specifically because they are so slow when remote. Mapped drives are actually generally the slower technology.
I don't know about that. I've used on-premise Sharepoint but still find it slower to browse and locate the file I want. If you have a large number of files, Sharepoint can be better because of its more advanced search capabilities. But with the relatively small number of files a typical user might have, organising by mapped drive and subfolders is often quicker, at least in my experience.
You can improve the Sharepoint experience by spending the time and effort to implement and maintain it correctly. But that's a lot of time and effort, so you have to have factor in that overhead when comparing the two solutions. Also factor in user training and support. "Speed" isn't just about network performance.
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@carnival-boy said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
You can improve the Sharepoint experience by spending the time and effort to implement and maintain it correctly.
Yes, Sharepoint is extremely slow, that's just Sharepoint.
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@carnival-boy said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
But with the relatively small number of files a typical user might have, organising by mapped drive and subfolders is often quicker, at least in my experience.
Keep in mind that, while this negates many of the points of these products, that Sharepoint, Nextcloud and many of these can expose as mapped drives - and are faster over a slow connection than traditional mapped drives.
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Did you try sync clients? The problem with moving away from mapped drives is like moving away from relational databases... we only define what we are "not" doing but there are many options of alternatives. So it's not one things versus another, it's one thing vs everything else.
What we do for our own is sync clients which allows our users to have local folders just like they are used to, and local speeds that are faster than mapped drives, and work offline for mobility.
Downside is local storage is used.
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So, update on my original topic.
@coliver said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
This is the script I am using. It works fairly well.
This script apparently broke about 3-4 months ago because of something that MS has changed within their systems. However, the author suggested IAM Cloud Drive Mapper for production use. If you use him as a reference, you get 25% off for the first year.
I am trying it out for 2 weeks, but it requires a client on the person's computer along with some alterations to the registry of the RDP servers. Not entirely comfortable with that.
My next option would be to place a shortcut on the desktop that will point to OneDrive for Business for the user to upload their files.
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@nerdydad said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
I am trying it out for 2 weeks, but it requires a client on the person's computer along with some alterations to the registry of the RDP servers. Not entirely comfortable with that.
Yuck. You're right to be uncomfortable. And, of course, at some point Microsoft will change something else and it will break this too.
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@nerdydad said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
So, update on my original topic.
@coliver said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
This is the script I am using. It works fairly well.
This script apparently broke about 3-4 months ago because of something that MS has changed within their systems. However, the author suggested IAM Cloud Drive Mapper for production use. If you use him as a reference, you get 25% off for the first year.
I am trying it out for 2 weeks, but it requires a client on the person's computer along with some alterations to the registry of the RDP servers. Not entirely comfortable with that.
My next option would be to place a shortcut on the desktop that will point to OneDrive for Business for the user to upload their files.
Hmm I JUST used it with no issue.
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@nerdydad said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
This script apparently broke about 3-4 months ago because of something that MS has changed within their systems. However, the author suggested IAM Cloud Drive Mapper for production use. If you use him as a reference, you get 25% off for the first year.
Did you try the script? I've been using it non-stop (and upgrading it) for the past 1-1.5 years. On my work computer to connect to my onedrive system. Not sure what changed but it doesn't appear to be affecting me.
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@carnival-boy said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
@nerdydad said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
I am trying it out for 2 weeks, but it requires a client on the person's computer along with some alterations to the registry of the RDP servers. Not entirely comfortable with that.
Yuck. You're right to be uncomfortable. And, of course, at some point Microsoft will change something else and it will break this too.
That's sadly accurate.
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@scottalanmiller said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
Did you try sync clients? The problem with moving away from mapped drives is like moving away from relational databases... we only define what we are "not" doing but there are many options of alternatives. So it's not one things versus another, it's one thing vs everything else.
What we do for our own is sync clients which allows our users to have local folders just like they are used to, and local speeds that are faster than mapped drives, and work offline for mobility.
Downside is local storage is used.
How do you deal with a large'ish shared drive?
We have a 100 GB (yeah I know not huge) shared drive. If everyone synced that, what would my chances of having a problem caused by two people editing the same file? We have many documents that are edited by many people. So this collision would be a huge problem for us.
in otherwords - does file lock go across these sync'ed files in Sharepoint/NC? -
With the wonderful help of @JackCPickup, we were able to use the script previously mentioned that I thought broke. One of my coworkers has been able to confirm that it works for them as well, as is. Perfect!
Now, next task is to automate the execution of the script when the user logs in.
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@nerdydad said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
With the wonderful help of @JackCPickup, we were able to use the script previously mentioned that I thought broke. One of my coworkers has been able to confirm that it works for them as well, as is. Perfect!
Now, next task is to automate the execution of the script when the user logs in.
You'll also need to run it when the login token expires. Not sure if you force your users to logout after a certain period of time or not.
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@nerdydad said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
With the wonderful help of @JackCPickup, we were able to use the script previously mentioned that I thought broke. One of my coworkers has been able to confirm that it works for them as well, as is. Perfect!
Now, next task is to automate the execution of the script when the user logs in.
SUCCESS!!!
I threw the script into my SysVol. Then threw this little snippit into my batch file
@start powershell.exe -Command ". '\\<AD Server>\sysvol\<Domain>\scripts\OneDriveMapper.ps1'" -
@nerdydad said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
@nerdydad said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
With the wonderful help of @JackCPickup, we were able to use the script previously mentioned that I thought broke. One of my coworkers has been able to confirm that it works for them as well, as is. Perfect!
Now, next task is to automate the execution of the script when the user logs in.
SUCCESS!!!
I threw the script into my SysVol. Then threw this little snippit into my batch file
@start powershell.exe -Command ". '\\<AD Server>\sysvol\<Domain>\scripts\OneDriveMapper.ps1'"Is it a sync, or does it map it without synchronizing all the OneDrive contents locally? A remote-only mapping would be great, or did I miss that somewhere above?
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I've seen issues with users who have multiple devices, where their OneDrive would fill up their hard drive on another device with less disk space.
And it's impossible to go around to hundreds of computers to customize OneDrive folder content sync settings.
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These are all just webDAV pointers without synchronizing OneDrive to all of the computers.
You are correct. We couldn't afford the storage that it would take for us to sync up everybody's OneDrive profiles across all of our servers, plus the backups that it would cost us. Dedup would help, but wouldn't be enough.
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@nerdydad said in Mapping OneDrive Business to a drive letter:
These are all just webDAV pointers without synchronizing OneDrive to all of the computers.
You are correct. We couldn't afford the storage that it would take for us to sync up everybody's OneDrive profiles across all of our servers, plus the backups that it would cost us. Dedup would help, but wouldn't be enough.
Onedrive has gotten better with Files on Demand but I would only recommend for user's individual files, not file shares. There is no file locking, and its just a mess for larger data sets. Those webdav scripts are a joke, wasted a lot of time on it. Your users will hate you.
For situations like these I have been using Azure Files. The SMB 3.0 stuff allows you to map drives directly to the cloud and you get the usual SMB features (and file locking). You can also install a premise server for caching of larger active datasets. SMB 3.0 includes all the good stuff from the Storsimple acquisition. Combine with Azure Domain Servers and Azure Active Directory, lots of options.
