I have been combing the internet and other resources for weeks trying to figure out how to have SharePoint shares sync to Windows File Explorer. That was the only thing stopping me from implementing my migration project. This was a life saver sir.
This was awesome. Up until now I've told clients that you can't use SharePoint like a file system and here it is, explained very clearly how you can do it.
Very good presentation, states the planning it needs to get done. Ya just cant take on your old file server and put it on sharepoing ya need proper and meticulous planning and ya need also your users with training.
@netoopaulo. Oh my god. YOU ARE THE BEST!!! YOU GET IT!!!! One of the wisest, most humble comments I have ever seen from an IT person here. Whoever you work for, be that a company as internal IT, or with clients as an MSP is VERY LUCKY to have you.
Thanks Wayne, this video was really useful. We are looking for some shared storage to replace our file server. We're just a small family business with 4 workers over 2 sites so this looks ideal. Much cheaper than upgrading our file server (still on Server 2003!) and scaleable if we ever need more users. There are so many advantages, it's a no brainer. I think we have a fair bit of data cleansing to do before migrating the files, and thanks for the comments regarding filename length and unsupported characters.
Just an update - I ran the migration last weekend, using the migration tools which I found quite easy to use (much netter than drag and drop for large numbers of files). Synchronised each of the users PC's and now they can see the company data in file explorer, just as if it's on a local or network drive. I am reasonably competent on IT (former IT manager) so if you are not sure then I would recommend asking for advice from a suitably experienced support professional. This is already paying for itself, without even looking into the other benefits of Sharepoint and Office 365. Thanks again Wayne for giving me the confidence to give it a try!
And now we need a good tutoriam on how to do it the other way around. I such a way we aren't bothered with either a Vendor Lockin or a painfull export of informationobjects. The latter being an structured export of the files and their respective metadata as well as your contextual information (like a fileplan/nesting).
Thank you very much for the information. Makes me feel comfortable and confident to move to SharePoint. Looking forward to watching more of your videos. :)
I dont get it, your filestructure seems to be much more lean than mine in file explore (at 11:26, Your "marketing - general" and "Sales general" ). In my sharepoint document folder, i have created a folder named "Test", This folder is not shown i fileexplore as "Test" however but as "Sitename - Test". Why it this and can i change it?
Hi Jesper, based on your comment, I would recommend building your file shares in Teams rather than SharePoint. You can't change the name as you though, that would be nice, and I'm confident Microsoft will eventually give us a way to change the display name to whatever we want. The names using Teams though is friendlier than SharePoint - if that make sense.
For our company the must have is preview of onlinie only files in file explorer. That was the reason we've resign sharepoint online back to local file server.
How do you bulk upload shares from existing file server up to SharePoint? At the 18:50 mark, there is demo of the Sync button to bring content "down" to a workstation (File Explorer) but how would the server admin first get all that content "up" to SharePoint?
That's a HUGE item. Here is a key point: I would NOT do a wholesales copy of your existing file shares into your pristine new setup of SharePoint document libraries or Teams Files. This is the time for your company to stop the madness with messy file shares and put some thought into what is actually going to be carried over into Microsoft 365 from a local file server. Of course, this is WAY easier said than done. Copying over files from one play to another - not a big deal. Doing it smartly...well, that is. Sorry I don't have a quicker answer for you on this, but what I described above is the result of hundreds of such conversations over the past few years with companies. DO NOT just simply copy over what you have.
the one thing that really does my head in when syncing to the computer is how it names the root folder you have synced with your "site name - " folder name. Would be great if it was just the folder name, without the site name, considering it is already sitting under a site category in the explorer. Makes for some long file paths in files when making references and for some reason annoys me to no end!
I agree with others on how clear and concise your video is. Thank you for putting this together. To your point on using retention policies vs a 3rd party backup, I still recommend using both retention policies and backups because of the potential of RansomCloud infecting an O365 tenant. It just gives me the piece of mind that we're still able to recover from an event such as that. It does, however, require the "right" 3rd party backup solution. Just my two cents.
@14:18 - What's your internet speed to Office365 at the time of this video, and what's the connection type? I have ordered 93 Microsoft 365 Business accounts, but only have 30Mbps-up/30Mbps-down fiber-internet, will this be good for fileserver in sharepoint?
I don't remember. I think maybe 60Mb down, 20Mb up and there were usually only like 6 people in the office at the same time - which is another important factor. Bandwidth shared by the typical number of people in the office. I'm going to guess your 93 users are not all under 1 roof all day every day, so, what is the typical number of people actually there using the Internet at the same time.
Great video Xerillion! Microsoft needs to invest in videos like these to get into the actual weeds of all of the different products they keep releasing. Actual ways to implement, showcasing details, and contrasting/merging it with things we know and trust (ie document file server). My main question from an IT admin perspective is, lets say you decommission your file server, put everything in SP and use OneDrive for the file explorer experience, how do you, as an admin combat things like sync issues? If you have a user, who's working on some critical company docs via the OneDrive client, and his client is not syncing changes back to the document library, how would you as an IT admin know/fix this before it becomes a huge issue? That is my one main hangup with OneDrive sync is that you could wind up with someone unknowingly working off of their local cache and never know about it until the team says "where are those documents?". Thoughts on this?
Thanks Adam! From my experience, this is a rare situation, and if OneDrive is not syncing, the user can see that near where the name of the files is at. They should be trained to ensure that before they close out the doc, that it is saved and not just rely on Auto-save. You could indeed be working on a document and look up at the "last saved" and it shows hours/days ago if you don't pay attention. If your user makes sure to hit the "save" button and check that it is sync'ing, they will be in good shape - just a training issue for something that is a rare issue altogether. That would be my input on that. Thanks for commenting :)
@@Xerillion Good to hear that it's a rare situation. Trying to think of end-user-ness things that could go wrong to make it as fool proof as possible. I know this isn't by design, but do you know if it's possible to use OneDrive client for the Windows Explorer experience, but to essentially not allow any local cache, forcing every file to be opened from the server directly? I know the file has to come down locally to be worked on, but then when then when it is sync'd back up, it is released from the local cache also...
@@adamlaw837 I'm not aware of a way to do that. If you want to go foolproof, then you would have people launch files direct out of Teams or SharePoint Portal, or train them how to check-in/check-out documents; and this is where the GREAT DIVIDE happens with companies and IT managers - both are trying to take M365 and do 1990's IT, when in fact the 2019 way of doing IT requires a more sophisticated approach, and a mindshift, and really, for the end-user (and the IT manager), some training.
Thanks Patrik! In our practice, we enable MFA for every single user at a client, as well as enable Cloud App Security, Office 365 ATP, and Windows Defender ATP, and Microsoft Intune - in addition to requiring the client's computers be upgraded the latest build of Windows and Office. We wouldn't do a project without MFA to be sure. I take the position that everyone's passwords have a high chance of being exposed wherever they have accounts, so MFA is imperative. I even made another video here on the channel recently about it. This particular video is about helping people mentally bridge the gap between files servers and moving to SharePoint Online and OneDrive, and understanding the superiority of it as a document management solution. Thanks for the feedback!
Hey there stranger. Been a long time since our interaction at Ares, Wayne. How are you? i wanted to say great video and awesome information. Thank you, sir. Love this.
Hi, great video that answers the questions most clients ask, in the simplest terms. Do you have a suggestion on structuring a client's "S drive" team site within their "main site". What is the best navigation in your opinion? A tile on the main page that just links directly there?
And also, maybe you have separate videos on this already, but how are you actually moving the data before cutting over? Is the SPMT or Migration Manager that Microsoft offer worth looking into? We have deadline of August 30th before the customer's file server is shutdown so need to formulate a plan of action. Any help would be much appreciated!
Hi Wayne. First of all, excellent video on how SPO works as a file server. However I was hoping for a guide on how the file server can be migrated to SPO, step-by-step. Could you link me to some guides?
Thank Shaan! My recommendation would be to look into the file migration tools inside your Microsoft 365 portal. The thing is this though...you'll get the tools, but you won't get strategy and "things to watch out for"...and "this thing doesn't quite work like you think it will" type of guidance. This is what holds IT managers back from doing this...they only work on a single network and they don't get the practical experience of doing these types of migrations over and over to actually move their system as they don't want to jeopardize their jobs. That is all understandable, but it just keep them frozen from doing the migration. I recommend finding a Microsoft cloud partner in your country with the Gold Cloud Productivity competency. I wouldn't try this on your own.
Great Vid! Can you comment on the "Sync" vs "Add Shortcut to OneDrive" feature now? I kind of tend to lean towards "Add Shortcut to OneDrive" as that makes it available not just on the device, but in other places for them...though that does present some issues in regards to device/security! THoughts?
I guess where I'm going is that Sync and Add Shortcut both kind of expand the ability to get a data. And it's easy to accidentally delete, or download and carry around lotsa files on your device, but they may not even be aware. I suppose at least if you drive them away from File Explorer and more towards the App (Teams, SharepointOnline), then you only need to worry about the access and not the local storage of files. Is there a way to enforce only ever being able to use Files on Demand? And not giving the option of having the whole thing downloaded on your comptuer? Or is that just training? THanks for the awesome video!!!
Thanks@@mattashfield2567 ! Yes, you can set restrictions if they can download the whole thing, though I don't think you can just specify Files on Demand, though not sure how that would work since you need that part in place to have any sync. People want to use File Explorer and it is the best way right now to at least get the files migrated without the users constantly complaining about how the "new system sucks", ect. And then from there, get a micro-video training system in place for Teams, OneDrive, ect.
thank you for this video! I have a question, ... I want to share a read only intranet with few clients outside my organization (insurance agency), having each client her own information ... is that possible to achive with SharePoint?
Yes, definitely. My only warning would be that it isn't you'll be able to look up in 30-60 minutes online and get something you feel confident about, and if you hire a consultant it will be something that will cost in the "thousands" vs. the "hundreds", and even finding someone will be a challenge. I'd focus on Teams rather than SharePoint.
Great video, clear, easy to understand. A question or two: -What is the storage capacity for Sharepoint Team Sites and the document libraries? -How would a person access the files remotely if they are working remotely from the office? Could they access the document library remotely only through accessing Sharepoint online? -Should I use a third party application to keep the files meta data in tact?
Thank you very much for this video, it is very helpful especially for some like me who is new to SharePoint. Can we get a copy of this presentation? I have a question If a company uses a shared drive and is moving to SharePoint, do they need to choose the Communication site?
Hi Abolaji, I wouldn't even know where that file is at this point, and as they take me a lot of time to put together, I don't send them out, though hopefully people get value they need from watching the videos themselves. Thanks for the compliment!
Wayne, Great description and I now have a much better understanding of the benefits. One detriment, or possible detriment. Local file server, mapped folder or network location connected to data. Data is kept on the server. Using the Sharepoint and Onedrive, with synced folders. Using a small company of 25 users, the data is now in the cloud, and on the 25 synced client machines. Is there any concern regarding stolen computers, and data brute force extracted?
Thanks Onda! In response to your question, files on a file server - in the traditional sense - have no security controls. Once someone has access - they can do whatever they wish with the files. So, the fact that the files require a "live connection" and not a "sync'd connection" is no real control or security...it's just the way people have always done it. Further every single time we setup a client's network we use Microsoft Intune to enable bitlocker encryption on a computer, and then turn on conditional access with Azure Active Directory to enforce that this is configured. Bitlocker solves the problem of data on a lost or stolen laptop and it comes with Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise.
Great explanation! That was really helpful, thank you!!! The Library folder (shown at 6:34) shows all other libraries? How do you do that? Is there a way to have Teams folders showing up in the main site libraries?
Thanks Diego! What you see the at that video reference point is the SharePoint web app, and that shows all the document libraries natively, so there is nothing to do there specifically.
Really good informative video, thanks. I might have missed it but you do not mention storage space availability for sharepoint online and how that works. I find that bit confusing when looking at MS's website.
Thanks Quintin! You make a good point, I need to add information on the storage you get in a SharePoint subscription to the videos. You get 1TB of shared storage + 10GB/user pooled to the shared storage. So, if you had 100 users, you'd get 2TB of shared storage available to you, and then if you needed more, you'd pay 20 cents/GB/month. So if you added an additional 1TB over your allotted 2TB of your 100 user company, you'd pay an additional $200/month above your Office 365 subscriptions. Then each user gets 1TB of OneDrive personal business storage, which an admin can crank up to 5TB without having to make a request to Microsoft. Thanks for the comment!
@@Xerillion The part where an admin "can crank up to 5TB ..." lost me. Do you mind clarifying your point. Your video convinced me to migrate, but would love some clarification on this point. Thank you.
Fantastic video Wayne. Should I have 1 team for each site office with the whole shared drive on 1 document library?? or multiple teams ( department) for for each site office with a document library for each department?
Great Video. We're about to replace our file server with sharepoint. However I did notice there is several different templates. Is there any you would advise we use? I have seen several people advise we use the 'Team Site (Classic Experience) or Document center under the enterprise section? Any advise would be greatly appreciated!
At this point in my consulting practice, is recommend putting your files in Teams. The backend is still SharePoint, but Teams is so much more straightforward.
My question to you: how messy is your 45TB file server? My guess? Extremely messy. At 45TB I'm guessing it's structure was put in place 20+ years ago, and IT manager after IT manager has had their fingers in it, making changes (many on the fly). There are lots of subfolders with disinherited permissions from the parent folder. There are probably subfolders with permissions for specific people instead of groups. 4.5 million of the 5 million files are not even actively used anymore and haven't been for along time. There are no retention policies setup to clear out useless files. This is so common, especially with big file servers like yours. My answer to anyone who I talk to in this situation is that I would **not** recreate their messy/old file server in their migration to Microsoft 365. I would use a modern architecture - and retrain and rethink how you are managing your files.
Well, you can post your question here and I'll try, though if it takes more than a few sentences, you'll probably need a Microsoft cloud solutions provider.
Awesome video! Thank you so much for posting! Question: Instead of Document libraries for each department folder, what do you think of just ONE document library (root of share drive) and sub folders as department folders (breaking inheritance from parent folder)? Anything to watch out for?
Thanks Jose! I think your idea is completely fine, and we have implemented such a setup plenty of times. The thing to look out for us retention policies are set at the site level, not the document library level. That's the only gotcha I'd keep in mind.
Thank you very much for this wonderful tutorial. Highly informative indeed, and bought clarity to a lot of things. I only have one question; how did you bring the SharePoint library in the File Explorer? I am referring to the "Building Icon", does it come automatically? As you mentioned, mapping the SharePoint Library as Network drive is extremely unreliable. Also, are you logging into the Windows using your Work or Personal credentials? Thanks once again for this.
Nice video however I have a couple quick questions: I have a file server using 2TB. I want to put that data up on Office365/Sharepoint/Onedrive. How do I calculate the storage costs for 2Tb of file server storage? Also what are the steps to set this up from the very beginning? Your video basically shows your system already set up but I need to know the steps on how to get where you are in your video. I already have Office 365 for email only but how do I know which Office 365 account I upgrade to in order to get Office365(incl'd applications), OneDrive, Sharepoint, 2TB Storage and step-by-step instructions on creating a Sharepoint site, Bulk copying documents into Sharepoint, connecting Sharepoint to Onedrive, sharing the documents out from Onedrive to the appropriate user groups and then setting up the users PCs/Macs to access the File shares. Thanks
I can help you with part 1 of your question: you get 1TB with your tenant and 0.5GB/subscriber pooled together for shared storage and each user gets 1TB of personal business storage (i.e. personal folders, home folders, ect.). After that it is $200/TB/month. Whatever you choose to retain with your retention policy will also count towards your total storage. The other part of your question is a huge professional undertaking and there isn't great content on doing it - and Microsoft's tools and the Office 365 tenant are a moving target: take 6 months and a ton of hard work to put a video together, and it will be outdated and wrong by the time you publish it - and that is why we have held off making a DIY course for IT Pro's on that matter - even a pain one. You are better off hiring a partner to get you migrated over, and teaching you some admin - and you take it from there, than trying to learn your first cutover by doing it with your employer - totally not worth the price you'll pay in terms of the hit to your career. You don't have to use us, but find a partner you like to work with and work with them, and then take it over youself; that is the smart way to do it.
Thanks for your video. One question i need answered. When i setup my company sharepoint site and add folders A, B, C, and D to the documents library, my company sharepoint name shows up as my sharepoint site in foldes and the first folder below this is called my sharepoint site name followed by "-documents" and then below this comes my folder A, B, C and D, Looking at your setup, your added foldes appear right under the shareppoint site logo in folders. How do i acchieve that?
Sorry for the slow response, somehow I missed this one. I think I understand what you are saying, but I'm not 100% sure I do. I don't sync an entire site, I only sync the specific document library that I want to put into Windows File Explorer.
Great video - thanks for the great explanation. Can you please let me know how to get the SharePoint building icon into the file explorer (or share a link where it is explained). I only seem to be able to find sites where they explain how to map the SharePoint drive...
Hi, Just wondering if this structure was created in the document center or Teams template? This was a great demo and explanation about the best way to build and structure sharepoint to replace traditional file servers.
Thanks! It was created in SharePoint and what we'd recommend for companies moving if file servers. Though, these days at Xerillion we do all our document sharing and management in Microsoft Teams.
So two questions. What do you do when people put multiple subfolders into the document library? After 3-4 sub folders aren't you hitting the URL limit? How do you deal with the thresholds? Our company has 600 employees and each is responsible for 4 training documents. That puts us almost 1/2 way to the threshold and that's just the yearly training limit.
You are right - there is a 400 character path limit. A SharePoint purist (I'm NOT one - I"m more of a Teams guy these days..but of course that uses SharePoint document libraries too) would say sorting your files by subfolders going 4-5 levels deep isn't modern document management - tagging these documents with a label in their metadata is the what you should be doing. Instead of a user clicking down 4 levels of subfolders to organize their data, it would be simpler if they had one box with a drop down that represented the options for folder 1, then a second drop down for folder 2, and a 3rd for folder 3, and so on. Organizing and searching becomes much faster and easier. Still, I get changing a workflow for 600 users would be rough and probably not realistic. But then again, it would be compared to the cost of maintaining and refreshing a file server, BDR, VPN, you and your IT dept.'s all-in wage cost to maintain the existing system. SharePoint Online wins hand-down.
@@Xerillion excellent thanks for the comment. Unfortunately I am dealing with some personal who are stuck deep in the nested sub folder idea and some of their folders go 8 to 10 folders deep. It hasn't been easy.
Wow great Video! Question: Do users really need OneDrive business to do their draft work and then once they have completed to move the file to SharePoint Share? Or can they work on their draft document directly on the sharepoint file share?
thanks for the video, just a quick question on that, do you maybe know why after clicking sync on the web, only folders and sub folder structure gets visible in file explorer ? no files got synced , they all look like empty folders, not sure what went wrong.
It sounds to me like you have the sync set to "Free Up Space" instead of "Always Keep on this Device". My preference is to keep it on "Free Up Space" and let OneDrive determine what should be sync'd locally.
@@Xerillion it turned out the person who uploaded all stuff to sharepoint didnt check IN them, by default all documents are checked out.. so others can sync folder structure but not able to see any files under those folders...
Thanks for the video! Wondering what your take on cloud to cloud backup for sharepoint is? I'm being told even with all the versioning and retention that a backup such as barracuda is a must.
Perfect video Wayne. The content, pace and practicality was great! Can I ask an OTT question? What do you use to put your videos together incorporating demos, slides, S9 mirror and webcam? It would be perfect for building up some self-service training videos for my staff.
Hi! Thanks for the compliment! In this video I was just using Skype on my Surface Pro-which I wouldn't recommend to make videos, but I'm an IT guy, not a video guy 😃 and so this is what was what I was able to get working at the time. There is so much that goes into this beyond the camera and software as well. I'd recommended finding a course online that has a few hours of technical content to get you started for making videos. And- of course, to just gotta start and make your mistakes and learn 😃
Hi great video, thanks for posting it. I have only two cases of concern about how to replace old file servers with Sharepoint. It is the case of projects that deal very big files, say some Gb per file, or linked files, like GIS projects. In one case you could end up moving files of 20 Gb to the Sharepoint cloud, and quite a bunch of them, consuming a lot of space and also slowing down the access to these compared to a file server network. In the other case, I don't see how files that inherently work through references like GIS projects or Excel files with links, could be kept in shape once the migration occur, or even how they could be constructed while in the cloud if the paths that need to be handled are long URLs. Is the technology able to handle these cases?
Thanks! I agree about your comments on really big files. I call it 'the big file problem' and I go into it later on in the video. If you have an internet connection of a lower grade than a 50-100Mb fiber, you have the potential of damage to the large files due to latency-as you mention. Also, collaborating in large files becomes problematic. In those cases you will need a local file cache solution, doesn't need to be a full blown server. This is where we use Azure Active sync. So so other shared folders go to SharePoint document libraries, and file folders with big files go to Azure file sync with a local file cache.
I would like to discuss in more detail Sharepoint/One Drive and file sharing options and services. Currently, as a business we use an in-house file storage server that just houses a bunch of folders and each user of the company has permissions to specific folders and such, its a big mess BUT works. We are looking to move to the cloud but concerned with TOO MANY options in software like Sharepoint that we would NEVER use or need. Is it possible to start off just replicating the same structure we have on the file-sharing server in Sharepoint without doing all the additional stuff it has to offer? I myself can then use the additions and add what we feel would benefit us as a company later?
Hi Dakota, yes, you certainly can do what you are describing - and in fact, that is what most our of clients do. They take their shared folder file server structure and replicate it to SharePoint document libraries, or Teams Files. Teams Files is my preference in 2019. Both SharePoint document libraries and Teams Files can be then sync'd with OneDrive Files on Demand to make it look and feel like mapped drives in Windows File Explorer - and it works really well. It also feels comfortable for your users as it is the way they are used to working with files.
@@Xerillion Awesome! Currently we just moved our email from our in-house server to exchange on Office365. For this all to work this way what would we need to purchase? A Office365 business account? and that should give us access to Sharepoint & Onedrive for the same price? or do We need to purchase these as two different things? If email works better we can discuss more dmartin@idfi.com
This all seems wonderful when using Microsoft products, but what to do when using other software that requires a file lock so two users aren't working on the same file at once? Can Sharepoint manage that for non-Microsoft products?
I don't know. If I were wondering that question, I'd have to check with the app developer in question to see if they explicitly have that support. If they don't explicitly state that, then I'd have to test it, which wouldn't be hard to do.
I stumbled across your video in my research for people expressing their experience on using sharepoint as an file server. I am testing this method to replace our fileserver. Now I see that you mentioned that the drive will break sometimes, which I saw myself. There is now a powershell script called "OneDriveMapper" which recreates on each login on the PC the link to sharepoint website and also deletes and recreates the sharepoint drive. Do you think it will still break at some point?
Well, this is an old video and has since been replace with a newer video on moving your files to Microsoft Teams. We don't use the method described here anymore. We use OneDrive Files on Demand which looks close enough to a drive mapping.
Very nice and helpful video. Thank you. Next time maybe show the camera part only when needed, and maximize the PPT display or computer screen. Better to read for people.
Thanks Olly! In my next video coming out, I present my screen as the whole screen. I finally figured out how to do that in a way I can stay on the screen. I also figured out how to make the display clearer. This video here was made 2 years ago when I had no idea what I was doing, and it was recorded in 1 take using Skype for Business :)
Thank you for the wonderful video, it was really helpful. WE also run an on-premise file server which has got large size CAD drawings and high resolution images. If we migrated to SharePoint, does it work as our files requires fast processing. What do you recommend.?
Thanks Jasim! SharePoint won't work for the large CAD file scenario you mention. For that you'll need Azure File Sync. We'll have a video on that in the future. If you are in the US, you can talk with our team about a solution.
This is all good, however in a real life situation we’re not all working on a Windows OS client using Microsoft apps and docs. We’re using Apple OSX and Adobe creative suite apps that have embedded links to resource files. What about the permissions too ? How are sub-folder ACL’s managed? I skipped through the video and maybe I missed this but what’s the deal on setting sub-folder permissions for groups of users? E.g. how do we map / translate sub-folder NTFS permissions of a traditional file server to that of Sharepoint? A bit more information on security permissions and how this works would be good. Many thanks
I cover my thoughts in the video relating to the questions you are asking. I'm not a fan of special sub-folder permissions in any situation - even when I used to put in file servers. They are messy and create security issues. I think, based on the questions you are asking, watching the entire video so you get the whole context would be helpful for you. I know it is a lot to watch, but IT is not simple - it is complex, especially modern enterprise cloud IT.
Hi! Is there any way to display all the root doc libraries on the home page of a site in one view without using the Site Contents view (that also shows other things like Site Assets and Style Libraries? Just the root folders like in your video, not the files.
So we were able to pull our files (somewhere near 300K plus folders) into SharePoint, however the sync runs constantly, sometimes with 15K changes in 24 hours. Any idea on how to fix this. We have multiple libraries, but 10-15 people who are all syncing them at the same time and most of them are using files on demand.
In our practice, we focus on keeping an individual user's sync under 300,000 items. Over 300,000 items and the sync will bog down as you are describing. So, the structure either needs to be adjusted to break the folders up so people aren't syncing everything, or they access though Teams or the SharePoint web app.
Hi, I found this to be a very helpful video and I've now managed to set up part of my companies file sharing on Sharepoint accessible through one drive. However we have a lot of excel workbooks that are linked to other excel workbooks and I don't think they'll work on Sharepoint accessed via Onedrive. I created a couple of excel workbooks and linked them within the Onedrive environment but then when I accessed the files via sharepoint online the links weren't present. Is this something that can be fixed? Or is it outside what the system can do?
Hi! I haven't tried it myself, though I suspect (and you have already tried) that you'll need to connect the links through a URL with corresponding permissions managed through Azure Active Directory. Again, you might have already tried it, but this is the route I'd be pursuing if we were faced with this, though we have not yet had to deal with this exact scenario.
You mentioned you have folders created by MS Teams (identified by the "- General" channel name). You have one (MS Teams Folder) for Sales, then a SharePoint Team Site named Sales also. I think this is going to be confusing for users. Shall we use Teams ONLY as a replacement for the fileserver, or try and cohabit Teams and SharePoint folders?
It depends on where you are starting and how motivated your company is to incorporate a modern workplace. In our case we went from a sales folder on a traditional file server to a sales document library in SharePoint, then moving to a sales Team with it's own Files tab. We no longer used the sales document library because Teams is so much more efficient and useful. It is a transition between 3 different systems. IT needs to lead the way WITH the FULL backing of FORWARD THINKING leadership.
Does the "free up space" and "keep it in my computer" works only on Windows 10? I tested on Windows 7 and there is no options like that (only options to Share, select what to sync and view online)
Hi Zobook, we don't use Windows 7 computers as they are end of life at this point. When we take on a new client, if there are any Windows 7 computers (rare), those get upgraded as part of the migration project. I do understand some companies are stuck with Windows 7 due to legacy apps they have not upgraded. In our practice though, we don't integrate these systems with Windows 7 computers.
Absolutely Brilliant explanation. Q. I think you said (and others did) that it’s not good practice to map a drive to OneDrive or SharePoint as this link will break at some stage. I did wonder though if it would be ok to point the location of the users documents folder to their Business OneDrive folder? This would mean the default documents save location is still in their OneDrive folder by default, which is still a local folder, but being synchronised to cloud? Or is this likely to cause issues?
Thanks! My suggestion would be to turn on the PC backup feature in OneDrive they will backup My Documents. I mention this in my updated 'files in Office 365' video I posted this past January.
@@Xerillion Thank you for replying to my question. I have view the clips you mention, but still have not got clarity. The instructions you show still have the “Documents” folder and "One Drive - Company" as separate locations. I was wanting to point the "Documents" folder location from "C:\Users\Username\Documents" to a Documents folder in the path of the One Drive folder. This way if the user saves to the default "Documents" folder, it is still stored in One Drive.
How do you deal with the path. The standard path is C:\Users\User\My Sharepoint Folder. In an organisation it is common and necessary to have the same path for every folder and file. How do I do that? The problem is also that several users can work on one PC and it should work even then. I would appreciate an answer. Thank you.
Wayne, what do you think about using a mailbox's Onedrive for Business folder to store departmental files instead of a Team Site ? The advantage of doing this is avoidance of Sharepoint Online storage costs at a hefty $0.2/GB/month. For example I can create a mailbox called Finance, allocate it up to 5 TB storage space in Onedrive for Business (OfB), migrate the Finance department's file server data to default document library (Documents) in OfB using the Sharepoint Migration Tool, then sharing the document library out to staff. Do you see any pitfalls to doing this instead of using a Team Site ? Thanks
Hi H.O. King - OneDrive is configured as a user's personal business files. It won't work well as a shared department folder- and I have seen it tried before. In your case, I'd use Microsoft Teams to create the Office 365 Group for the General channel, and that will create the document library you need, and your users can sync with (Admining document libraries in Teams is easier than using the SharePoint Online portal). I'd "map" the drives to the document libraries your users need on their computers. Your users will then have a real mapping to the file server and a "look-alike" mapping to the document library. From there you make the shared folder read-only; no new files go here - they go to the Sharepoint document library. If they want to work with old files, they need to copy them from the read-only file server to the "mapping" in SharePoint. You can leave it like this if you want, or explain they have 90 days to migrate the files they need, and after 90 days you'll turn off the shared file server folder, at which point the file server folder just becomes an archive they can always retrieve data from if they need it. This strategy DRAMATICALLY cleans up your shared folders that have decades of irrelevant files and a messy file structure.
Xerillion Hi Wayne, I’m curious to know why you think OfB isn’t a good solution for a shared departmental folder. What sort of problems did you observe with this approach ? I understand that Microsoft intend to offer unlimited OfB storage space once again (quite frankly 5 TB per user is unlimited to all intents and purposes, and they will increase this to 25 TB at no extra cost if you ask), so its extremely tempting to use this for shared data. MS Teams is great but it lives on SharePoint Online and therefore additional storage for it must be bought at $0.2/GB/month. Thanks for your insight.
@@HOKING-ef8dj When I saw it deployed by a previous IT person, multiple people were logging in with the same credentials to sync the files and it was messy. If your company has 40TB of file data, that is really huge. I'd go with the approach I mentioned above.
How do you face the issue /limit where you reach 5000 items and hit the list view limit...The 5000 item list view threshold error can be a pain. Interested to know your work around for this.
I mentioned it in a few other responses - but we don't do a "wholesale" copy of file server files to SharePoint or Teams. We us this project to "clean house".
I have not seen it happen yet, though if you have retention policies in place, you'll always be able to recover files from the presentation hold library.
What i struggle with is: we migrated our files using mover io, from one user, directly into the sharepoint documents. The thing is, we can't remove or adapt ACL's, because theres to many items. Is there a migration strategy somewhere on how to setup the acl structure and properly migrate the files?
What I tell IT Pro's is to not do a simple transfer. When you do this project it's time to clean house on your file shares and thoughtfully build your new "shares" in Teams with new ACL's, ect.
Amazing video Wayne! We're in the process the migrating our companies file server to SharePoint libraries using the SharePoint migration tool. However, tons of our users are running into sync issues. Do you have any preparation tips to perform before migrating files to avoid sync issues?
Yeah, we scan the file server folders for do many different things before migrating. Besides the characters SharePoint doesn't like, there are path length considerations, and a 300,000 file sync limit on overdrive to deal with.
Hi Wayne, i'm realizing that i've been trying to use sharepoint through onedrive instead of going through sharepoint. By default, is there a cap on the size of document library in sharepoint? If so what are the cost related to expanding the storage? My company is pretty large but i haven't ask the system admin. With onedrive, we're limited to 1TB. Thank you for the informative walkthrough.
Just Google search something like "sharepoint online limits" and you'll get the information you are looking for. There is some huge limit, and you will pay 20 cents per GB/month after you pass the allotment you get with your subscription.
Is there anyway I can sync my sharepoint folders that I choose, sync to all my users in the company (not download, just sync). I do not want to have to walk to over 200 computers and do this manually for every single user.
How do you get that SharePoint folder in your file explorer? You can get the OneDrive link through the desktop version of OneDrive but how’d you get the Sharepoint one?
Great video Wayne. Going to invest a lot more time in this. You mentioned about active directory to. Is there a way to put that into 365 and get pcs joined to the cloud domain?
Gotcha, you know, I'm actually not sure of that as we really only do Microsoft 365 Enterprise any more, which include Azure AD Premium. If you wanted to just go straight Office 365 without EMS, it would be easy to test an Azure AD Join.
We are trying to set up sharepoint for our company but I am having issues figuring out how to only allow the Accounting group to have access to the accounting files. Do you have a video about permissions?
Hi, we have moved on to Office 365 using a file sever and cloud backup. How sophisticated is the SharePoint backup? e.g we have daily, weekly, monthly and annual mirror cloud backup.
Hi Eugene, Office 365 uses retention policies, not backups. I have another video on here about the subject. Check it out and post in the video comments if you have any questions.
There is no way around it...they will have to be reset and resetting them to URL's will take some testing...testing and patience. My experience so far is clients ultimately give up trying to modify documents with lots of UNC links to URL links. If a client has high dependency on those types of legacy documents, your probably stuck with setting up an Azure virtual network and using Azure Files or a Windows Server VM, and connecting to them with a VPN or Windows Virtual Desktop depending on internet bandwidth, and your latency between your LAN and the Azure datacenter region your virtual network is in.
How does Sharepoint handle links? Like my accountants link other files within excel docs so they can quickly open them. Or even link data from other excel docs and aggregate them into one file. Can they do this?
Well, I guess it depends if you and your accountants are in the same Azure AD tenant or not. If yes, you can just change the file share links to URL's.
We have virtual desktops which have their local drives as network drives and can't really install the one drive client. What is the best way we can replace our fileserver with onedrive? Not easy to map directly to onedrive. Any recommendation greatly appreciated!
Hi Peter - It is still doable, and we have done it several times in an RDS deployment. You don't really "map" to OneDrive, but you make it look like mapping so users feel comfortable in File Explorer, and can drag/drop files like they are used to. The "mapping" is really a sync technology (which is superior to drive mapping). With OneDrive Files on Demand, you then don't have to sync everything - just the stuff the user needs. OneDrive will sync all the names of the files so it *looks* like the files are there and they can search on it, but in fact only the files they really need are taking up any space. Then you get all the benefits of SharePoint (retention policies, classification and labeling, data loss prevention, versioning, deep search, Windows Information Protection, ect.).
I need to provide access to the invoices folder to a person. It is located under clients / client / finance / bookkeeping / payables / invoices. This doesn't work in Teams without creating a group. Works fine on Box. User only sees invoices.
Hi Rick. My perspective is this: you are trying to apply old school file server folder access controls to Teams, and that won't work. A team, in Teams, is based off groups that collaborate together with modern workflows. The team that should be created in your example is "Bookkeeping" (for us it is "Accounting") and everyone on that team will have access to all files. We have another team called Finance and everyone in Finance had access to all the files. Granting access control for a single user 5 nested subfolders down is not good access control management and I would not recommend it. Defining your access controls in a modern way with Teams is much cleaner and more secure. Designing shared file structure in Teams requires a shift in thinking.
@@Xerillion Thanks for the reply. Yes, I have tried a number of schemes over the years having been an early adopter of box. I have no issue using security groups (ms teams), but they should allow us to rename the first channel. I did look at SharePoint years ago, but got lost in it creating a lot of mess. I am now migrating over to SharePoint to keep all our processes in one place. I'll revisit our best practices now that MS is catching up to the rest of the SaaS community. Thanks again. Than
Have you ever used Brandfolder for DAM? If so do you think SharePoint works as an alternative - especially since you can add a user to a folder who doesn't have a 365 account?
Hi, What a great video! We are working on doing this exact thing now for our company data (around 20TBs) We've got everything you have (Sharepoint Online, OneDrive sync Tool, Document Libraries arranged) however, I am not seeing the cloud icons or the option to "free up space" and manage the storage of items locally. Any ideas why this would not be working or not be visible?
Hi, just in case anyone else combs through these for helpful info (Thank you for the great video), if you have the latest OneDrive app, it's probably just a matter of enabling "Files on Demand" on the first tab of the OneDrive client. I had the same question & after checking this, I now see the those icons.
Are these files accessible on mobile devices? I have the OneDrive app and my company is currently using Box Sync with a phone app to access the files from a mobile device. Will I lose that functionality if we were to switch to Sharepoint from Box Sync?
Great video. But what if a laptop with a synced OneDrive is stolen? Those files are still on the hard drive. Currently using a network share without syncing, there are no files stored on the Laptop or PC. Is there a way to not sync anything to the computer, but still see the files that are in the cloud using OneDrive?
Thanks D! A few things I'd say: the classic case of the computer gets stolen or loss is what disk encryption is used for (i.e, Windows Bitlocker). At Xerillion, Intune checks Windows/IOS/Android OS devices connecting to our cloud services for encryption and if that check fails the user is not allowed to connect with that device through a conditional access policy - even if they are a valid user. Also, with OneDrive Files on Demand, you only need to sync the files are using. You don't need to sync the entire folder.
We have migrated file server data to SharePoint online teams site with onprem permission. is there any way so that we can create list content permission on that site, person can open site and view site document directory but can't read any file. only able to access allowed Folders.
Great Demo, I would say you still need a backup solution though? What about malicious user actions such as moving folders around etc. It's not just about deleting. I would still want to use a 3rd party backup solution.
Hey Matt! Regarding backups - in Office 365/SharePoint Online/OneDrive - you don't manage a backup system, you manage retention policies - which are much more powerful than backups. Retention policies make backups look archaic. I go over this very point in this video here on my channel "How to "Backup" Emails and Files in Office 365 for FREE" : th-cam.com/video/zr1XiSC_aXA/w-d-xo.html
@@Xerillion . I was just thinking if a disgruntled user decided to move the folder structure around heavily, a better get out would be to restore the layout if you are dealing with a layout of 100's of folders nested. I wasn't aware you could do this without something like Veeam, or CloudAlly
@@Sailing_Reality I understand. I haven't looked back at permissions in a few months, and haven't had to look at this issue specifically, though I believe there is a permission around if someone can modify folder structures. -Wayne
@@Sailing_Reality You raised a good question so I had to look. I think this is what you are looking for? social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/7ff24b56-a50d-4343-bf3a-5732ab035331/preventing-users-from-deleting-any-list-item-or-folder-from-all-share-point-listslibraries?forum=sharepointdevelopment
@@Sailing_Reality One of my engineers literally posted this this morning in Teams - I think you'll like this: techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Files-restore-for-SharePoint-and-Microsoft-Teams/ba-p/480760?ranMID=24542&ranEAID=je6NUbpObpQ&ranSiteID=je6NUbpObpQ-QNgRXX2CAV3cRcJHGLDtAw&epi=je6NUbpObpQ-QNgRXX2CAV3cRcJHGLDtAw&irgwc=1&OCID=AID681541_aff_7593_1243925&tduid=(ir__d3glw92ecgkfrk39xc1u9inwzv2xmpr23lwu6aj100)(7593)(1243925)(je6NUbpObpQ-QNgRXX2CAV3cRcJHGLDtAw)()&irclickid=_d3glw92ecgkfrk39xc1u9inwzv2xmpr23lwu6aj100
Wayne, I have been looking into a OneDrive and SharePoint solution for a client of mine. I have posted a few questions on reddit and each time I post I receive two major sticking points. 1. Complaints about files with long file names 2. 300k file limit for larger clients. What do you do for your clients regarding these limitations?
When we migrate clients, we review their folders and files to look for the problems you mention. Normally, client's file servers are huge mess - and they know it and they want to clean it up. So, 50% of the time, we do not simply copy everything over. The client only copies over files they need, and then the old file server becomes an archive. This is my preferred method as well; then you don't have the issues you are referring to.
Hi Dan, thanks for the input. This video is 2 years old and these days, we move file servers to Microsoft Teams. Here it is: th-cam.com/video/ZrIGdLz1-p0/w-d-xo.html and I discuss permissions, but bottom line is that Teams makes permissions and access controls extremely easy. I would only do SharePoint document libraries at this point if someone needs very granular access control requirements.
@@Xerillion I started watching it just now. Haha it's funny to watch these videos back to back because things you were super thrilled/talked highly about on this video, you'd very monotone and annoyed with them in the next video. Crazy what
I have been combing the internet and other resources for weeks trying to figure out how to have SharePoint shares sync to Windows File Explorer. That was the only thing stopping me from implementing my migration project. This was a life saver sir.
This was awesome. Up until now I've told clients that you can't use SharePoint like a file system and here it is, explained very clearly how you can do it.
By far the best explanation on how to use Sharepoint for file/document storage!!! Thank you Wayne.
I agree - best discussion of this topic ive seen presented !
Thanks Wayne for the simplest explanation on how to use SharePoint.
Very good presentation, states the planning it needs to get done. Ya just cant take on your old file server and put it on sharepoing ya need proper and meticulous planning and ya need also your users with training.
@netoopaulo. Oh my god. YOU ARE THE BEST!!! YOU GET IT!!!! One of the wisest, most humble comments I have ever seen from an IT person here. Whoever you work for, be that a company as internal IT, or with clients as an MSP is VERY LUCKY to have you.
If only every O365 video was this good, Microsoft should hire you.
Subbed! This is exactly what I was looking for; it pretty much answers all of my questions.
Thanks Wayne, this video was really useful. We are looking for some shared storage to replace our file server. We're just a small family business with 4 workers over 2 sites so this looks ideal. Much cheaper than upgrading our file server (still on Server 2003!) and scaleable if we ever need more users. There are so many advantages, it's a no brainer. I think we have a fair bit of data cleansing to do before migrating the files, and thanks for the comments regarding filename length and unsupported characters.
Just an update - I ran the migration last weekend, using the migration tools which I found quite easy to use (much netter than drag and drop for large numbers of files). Synchronised each of the users PC's and now they can see the company data in file explorer, just as if it's on a local or network drive. I am reasonably competent on IT (former IT manager) so if you are not sure then I would recommend asking for advice from a suitably experienced support professional. This is already paying for itself, without even looking into the other benefits of Sharepoint and Office 365. Thanks again Wayne for giving me the confidence to give it a try!
better not netter
And now we need a good tutoriam on how to do it the other way around. I such a way we aren't bothered with either a Vendor Lockin or a painfull export of informationobjects. The latter being an structured export of the files and their respective metadata as well as your contextual information (like a fileplan/nesting).
Thank you very much for the information. Makes me feel comfortable and confident to move to SharePoint. Looking forward to watching more of your videos. :)
I dont get it, your filestructure seems to be much more lean than mine in file explore (at 11:26, Your "marketing - general" and "Sales general" ). In my sharepoint document folder, i have created a folder named "Test", This folder is not shown i fileexplore as "Test" however but as "Sitename - Test". Why it this and can i change it?
Hi Jesper, based on your comment, I would recommend building your file shares in Teams rather than SharePoint. You can't change the name as you though, that would be nice, and I'm confident Microsoft will eventually give us a way to change the display name to whatever we want. The names using Teams though is friendlier than SharePoint - if that make sense.
GREAT video! You are very clear and confident on your explanation. Thank you, Wayne!
Fantastic demo, very useful just about to migrate our company server into the cloud and this ahs really helped
For our company the must have is preview of onlinie only files in file explorer. That was the reason we've resign sharepoint online back to local file server.
Hi there, many thanks for this presentation, highly comprehensive!
How do you bulk upload shares from existing file server up to SharePoint? At the 18:50 mark, there is demo of the Sync button to bring content "down" to a workstation (File Explorer) but how would the server admin first get all that content "up" to SharePoint?
That's a HUGE item. Here is a key point: I would NOT do a wholesales copy of your existing file shares into your pristine new setup of SharePoint document libraries or Teams Files. This is the time for your company to stop the madness with messy file shares and put some thought into what is actually going to be carried over into Microsoft 365 from a local file server. Of course, this is WAY easier said than done. Copying over files from one play to another - not a big deal. Doing it smartly...well, that is. Sorry I don't have a quicker answer for you on this, but what I described above is the result of hundreds of such conversations over the past few years with companies. DO NOT just simply copy over what you have.
The best tutorial on OneDrive and SharePoint I've seen so far. Fantastic job! Thank you very much!
the one thing that really does my head in when syncing to the computer is how it names the root folder you have synced with your "site name - " folder name. Would be great if it was just the folder name, without the site name, considering it is already sitting under a site category in the explorer. Makes for some long file paths in files when making references and for some reason annoys me to no end!
Oliver, completely agree with you! I wish we could even rename it to something friendly to the user.
Wayne : thanks for sharing and give us this very simple explanation!
I agree with others on how clear and concise your video is. Thank you for putting this together. To your point on using retention policies vs a 3rd party backup, I still recommend using both retention policies and backups because of the potential of RansomCloud infecting an O365 tenant. It just gives me the piece of mind that we're still able to recover from an event such as that. It does, however, require the "right" 3rd party backup solution. Just my two cents.
@14:18 - What's your internet speed to Office365 at the time of this video, and what's the connection type?
I have ordered 93 Microsoft 365 Business accounts, but only have 30Mbps-up/30Mbps-down fiber-internet, will this be good for fileserver in sharepoint?
I don't remember. I think maybe 60Mb down, 20Mb up and there were usually only like 6 people in the office at the same time - which is another important factor. Bandwidth shared by the typical number of people in the office. I'm going to guess your 93 users are not all under 1 roof all day every day, so, what is the typical number of people actually there using the Internet at the same time.
@@Xerillion sounds like cable or ADSL?, so 10Mb per user.
Thanks.
Great video Xerillion! Microsoft needs to invest in videos like these to get into the actual weeds of all of the different products they keep releasing. Actual ways to implement, showcasing details, and contrasting/merging it with things we know and trust (ie document file server). My main question from an IT admin perspective is, lets say you decommission your file server, put everything in SP and use OneDrive for the file explorer experience, how do you, as an admin combat things like sync issues? If you have a user, who's working on some critical company docs via the OneDrive client, and his client is not syncing changes back to the document library, how would you as an IT admin know/fix this before it becomes a huge issue? That is my one main hangup with OneDrive sync is that you could wind up with someone unknowingly working off of their local cache and never know about it until the team says "where are those documents?". Thoughts on this?
Thanks Adam! From my experience, this is a rare situation, and if OneDrive is not syncing, the user can see that near where the name of the files is at. They should be trained to ensure that before they close out the doc, that it is saved and not just rely on Auto-save. You could indeed be working on a document and look up at the "last saved" and it shows hours/days ago if you don't pay attention. If your user makes sure to hit the "save" button and check that it is sync'ing, they will be in good shape - just a training issue for something that is a rare issue altogether. That would be my input on that. Thanks for commenting :)
@@Xerillion Good to hear that it's a rare situation. Trying to think of end-user-ness things that could go wrong to make it as fool proof as possible. I know this isn't by design, but do you know if it's possible to use OneDrive client for the Windows Explorer experience, but to essentially not allow any local cache, forcing every file to be opened from the server directly? I know the file has to come down locally to be worked on, but then when then when it is sync'd back up, it is released from the local cache also...
@@adamlaw837 I'm not aware of a way to do that. If you want to go foolproof, then you would have people launch files direct out of Teams or SharePoint Portal, or train them how to check-in/check-out documents; and this is where the GREAT DIVIDE happens with companies and IT managers - both are trying to take M365 and do 1990's IT, when in fact the 2019 way of doing IT requires a more sophisticated approach, and a mindshift, and really, for the end-user (and the IT manager), some training.
@8:37 - is the map drive a subst command or a hardlink junction command ?
No, it isn't.
Great demo / pitch. Kudos Wayne.
Excellent video, just what I was looking for! A bit surprised though that you did not mention 2FA which I would recommend activating.
Thanks Patrik! In our practice, we enable MFA for every single user at a client, as well as enable Cloud App Security, Office 365 ATP, and Windows Defender ATP, and Microsoft Intune - in addition to requiring the client's computers be upgraded the latest build of Windows and Office. We wouldn't do a project without MFA to be sure. I take the position that everyone's passwords have a high chance of being exposed wherever they have accounts, so MFA is imperative. I even made another video here on the channel recently about it. This particular video is about helping people mentally bridge the gap between files servers and moving to SharePoint Online and OneDrive, and understanding the superiority of it as a document management solution. Thanks for the feedback!
Great tutorial, just what I was looking for. Oddly, Dropbox was one of the inserted TH-cam ads, ha!
Hey there stranger. Been a long time since our interaction at Ares, Wayne. How are you? i wanted to say great video and awesome information. Thank you, sir. Love this.
Wow! Ping! Great to hear from you!! Thanks for the kind words my friend!👍👍
Great video, thanks for going so in depth, and touching on working with the senior level on implementation. That can be a big obstacle!
Hi, great video that answers the questions most clients ask, in the simplest terms. Do you have a suggestion on structuring a client's "S drive" team site within their "main site". What is the best navigation in your opinion? A tile on the main page that just links directly there?
And also, maybe you have separate videos on this already, but how are you actually moving the data before cutting over? Is the SPMT or Migration Manager that Microsoft offer worth looking into? We have deadline of August 30th before the customer's file server is shutdown so need to formulate a plan of action. Any help would be much appreciated!
We use various tools depending on the situation, but starting with SPMT would be recommended.
Hi Wayne. First of all, excellent video on how SPO works as a file server. However I was hoping for a guide on how the file server can be migrated to SPO, step-by-step. Could you link me to some guides?
Thank Shaan! My recommendation would be to look into the file migration tools inside your Microsoft 365 portal. The thing is this though...you'll get the tools, but you won't get strategy and "things to watch out for"...and "this thing doesn't quite work like you think it will" type of guidance. This is what holds IT managers back from doing this...they only work on a single network and they don't get the practical experience of doing these types of migrations over and over to actually move their system as they don't want to jeopardize their jobs. That is all understandable, but it just keep them frozen from doing the migration. I recommend finding a Microsoft cloud partner in your country with the Gold Cloud Productivity competency. I wouldn't try this on your own.
Great Vid! Can you comment on the "Sync" vs "Add Shortcut to OneDrive" feature now? I kind of tend to lean towards "Add Shortcut to OneDrive" as that makes it available not just on the device, but in other places for them...though that does present some issues in regards to device/security!
THoughts?
I guess where I'm going is that Sync and Add Shortcut both kind of expand the ability to get a data. And it's easy to accidentally delete, or download and carry around lotsa files on your device, but they may not even be aware. I suppose at least if you drive them away from File Explorer and more towards the App (Teams, SharepointOnline), then you only need to worry about the access and not the local storage of files.
Is there a way to enforce only ever being able to use Files on Demand? And not giving the option of having the whole thing downloaded on your comptuer? Or is that just training?
THanks for the awesome video!!!
Thanks@@mattashfield2567 ! Yes, you can set restrictions if they can download the whole thing, though I don't think you can just specify Files on Demand, though not sure how that would work since you need that part in place to have any sync. People want to use File Explorer and it is the best way right now to at least get the files migrated without the users constantly complaining about how the "new system sucks", ect. And then from there, get a micro-video training system in place for Teams, OneDrive, ect.
Thank you. Very helpful, even though it’s 2021, it’s still very relevant. Maybe that restore previous version is a thing now?
Hmm, not sure what you mean?
thank you for this video! I have a question, ... I want to share a read only intranet with few clients outside my organization (insurance agency), having each client her own information ... is that possible to achive with SharePoint?
Yes, definitely. My only warning would be that it isn't you'll be able to look up in 30-60 minutes online and get something you feel confident about, and if you hire a consultant it will be something that will cost in the "thousands" vs. the "hundreds", and even finding someone will be a challenge. I'd focus on Teams rather than SharePoint.
Great video, clear, easy to understand.
A question or two:
-What is the storage capacity for Sharepoint Team Sites and the document libraries?
-How would a person access the files remotely if they are working remotely from the office? Could they access the document library remotely only through accessing Sharepoint online?
-Should I use a third party application to keep the files meta data in tact?
Thank you very much for this video, it is very helpful especially for some like me who is new to SharePoint. Can we get a copy of this presentation? I have a question If a company uses a shared drive and is moving to SharePoint, do they need to choose the Communication site?
Hi Abolaji, I wouldn't even know where that file is at this point, and as they take me a lot of time to put together, I don't send them out, though hopefully people get value they need from watching the videos themselves. Thanks for the compliment!
Wayne,
Great description and I now have a much better understanding of the benefits. One detriment, or possible detriment. Local file server, mapped folder or network location connected to data. Data is kept on the server. Using the Sharepoint and Onedrive, with synced folders. Using a small company of 25 users, the data is now in the cloud, and on the 25 synced client machines. Is there any concern regarding stolen computers, and data brute force extracted?
Thanks Onda! In response to your question, files on a file server - in the traditional sense - have no security controls. Once someone has access - they can do whatever they wish with the files. So, the fact that the files require a "live connection" and not a "sync'd connection" is no real control or security...it's just the way people have always done it. Further every single time we setup a client's network we use Microsoft Intune to enable bitlocker encryption on a computer, and then turn on conditional access with Azure Active Directory to enforce that this is configured. Bitlocker solves the problem of data on a lost or stolen laptop and it comes with Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise.
Best explanation I've seen yet.
Great explanation! That was really helpful, thank you!!!
The Library folder (shown at 6:34) shows all other libraries? How do you do that?
Is there a way to have Teams folders showing up in the main site libraries?
Thanks Diego! What you see the at that video reference point is the SharePoint web app, and that shows all the document libraries natively, so there is nothing to do there specifically.
Great explanation - thank you! I notice when you share you screen at 7:44 that your OneDrive folders have different names. How do you do this?
Thanks Emma! All I did there was configure OneDrive to sync those folders - and those folders were built out in Teams.
Good clear overview of current features of SP and OneDrive for business - Thanks Wayne
Really good informative video, thanks. I might have missed it but you do not mention storage space availability for sharepoint online and how that works. I find that bit confusing when looking at MS's website.
Thanks Quintin! You make a good point, I need to add information on the storage you get in a SharePoint subscription to the videos. You get 1TB of shared storage + 10GB/user pooled to the shared storage. So, if you had 100 users, you'd get 2TB of shared storage available to you, and then if you needed more, you'd pay 20 cents/GB/month. So if you added an additional 1TB over your allotted 2TB of your 100 user company, you'd pay an additional $200/month above your Office 365 subscriptions. Then each user gets 1TB of OneDrive personal business storage, which an admin can crank up to 5TB without having to make a request to Microsoft. Thanks for the comment!
@@Xerillion thanks for your quick response, it makes a lot more sense to me now.
@@Xerillion The part where an admin "can crank up to 5TB ..." lost me. Do you mind clarifying your point. Your video convinced me to migrate, but would love some clarification on this point. Thank you.
@@jonotworth I mean the user starts with 1 TB storage in OneDrive, but the admin can increase that to 5TB.
Fantastic video Wayne. Should I have 1 team for each site office with the whole shared drive on 1 document library?? or multiple teams ( department) for for each site office with a document library for each department?
Thanks! I'd have one site, and then separate document libraries for each department.
@@Xerillion thanks so much for the quick reply! Keep up the great work!
Great Video. We're about to replace our file server with sharepoint. However I did notice there is several different templates. Is there any you would advise we use? I have seen several people advise we use the 'Team Site (Classic Experience) or Document center under the enterprise section? Any advise would be greatly appreciated!
At this point in my consulting practice, is recommend putting your files in Teams. The backend is still SharePoint, but Teams is so much more straightforward.
Sorry. I forgot to add. We’re also talking about 45TB of data and roughly 5 million files.
How does Sharepoint cope with that ?
Thank you
My question to you: how messy is your 45TB file server? My guess? Extremely messy. At 45TB I'm guessing it's structure was put in place 20+ years ago, and IT manager after IT manager has had their fingers in it, making changes (many on the fly). There are lots of subfolders with disinherited permissions from the parent folder. There are probably subfolders with permissions for specific people instead of groups. 4.5 million of the 5 million files are not even actively used anymore and haven't been for along time. There are no retention policies setup to clear out useless files. This is so common, especially with big file servers like yours. My answer to anyone who I talk to in this situation is that I would **not** recreate their messy/old file server in their migration to Microsoft 365. I would use a modern architecture - and retrain and rethink how you are managing your files.
@@Xerillion Well explained
Hi ..Its very nice explanation...Need some technical guidance on permssions...Could you please help me ?
Well, you can post your question here and I'll try, though if it takes more than a few sentences, you'll probably need a Microsoft cloud solutions provider.
Awesome video! Thank you so much for posting! Question: Instead of Document libraries for each department folder, what do you think of just ONE document library (root of share drive) and sub folders as department folders (breaking inheritance from parent folder)? Anything to watch out for?
Thanks Jose! I think your idea is completely fine, and we have implemented such a setup plenty of times. The thing to look out for us retention policies are set at the site level, not the document library level. That's the only gotcha I'd keep in mind.
Thank you very much for this wonderful tutorial. Highly informative indeed, and bought clarity to a lot of things. I only have one question; how did you bring the SharePoint library in the File Explorer? I am referring to the "Building Icon", does it come automatically? As you mentioned, mapping the SharePoint Library as Network drive is extremely unreliable. Also, are you logging into the Windows using your Work or Personal credentials? Thanks once again for this.
I know im 9 months late. Within a Team Library click "syncronise" and it will appear
Nice video however I have a couple quick questions: I have a file server using 2TB. I want to put that data up on Office365/Sharepoint/Onedrive. How do I calculate the storage costs for 2Tb of file server storage? Also what are the steps to set this up from the very beginning? Your video basically shows your system already set up but I need to know the steps on how to get where you are in your video. I already have Office 365 for email only but how do I know which Office 365 account I upgrade to in order to get Office365(incl'd applications), OneDrive, Sharepoint, 2TB Storage and step-by-step instructions on creating a Sharepoint site, Bulk copying documents into Sharepoint, connecting Sharepoint to Onedrive, sharing the documents out from Onedrive to the appropriate user groups and then setting up the users PCs/Macs to access the File shares.
Thanks
I can help you with part 1 of your question: you get 1TB with your tenant and 0.5GB/subscriber pooled together for shared storage and each user gets 1TB of personal business storage (i.e. personal folders, home folders, ect.). After that it is $200/TB/month. Whatever you choose to retain with your retention policy will also count towards your total storage. The other part of your question is a huge professional undertaking and there isn't great content on doing it - and Microsoft's tools and the Office 365 tenant are a moving target: take 6 months and a ton of hard work to put a video together, and it will be outdated and wrong by the time you publish it - and that is why we have held off making a DIY course for IT Pro's on that matter - even a pain one. You are better off hiring a partner to get you migrated over, and teaching you some admin - and you take it from there, than trying to learn your first cutover by doing it with your employer - totally not worth the price you'll pay in terms of the hit to your career. You don't have to use us, but find a partner you like to work with and work with them, and then take it over youself; that is the smart way to do it.
Thanks for your video. One question i need answered. When i setup my company sharepoint site and add folders A, B, C, and D to the documents library, my company sharepoint name shows up as my sharepoint site in foldes and the first folder below this is called my sharepoint site name followed by "-documents" and then below this comes my folder A, B, C and D, Looking at your setup, your added foldes appear right under the shareppoint site logo in folders. How do i acchieve that?
Sorry for the slow response, somehow I missed this one. I think I understand what you are saying, but I'm not 100% sure I do. I don't sync an entire site, I only sync the specific document library that I want to put into Windows File Explorer.
Great video - thanks for the great explanation. Can you please let me know how to get the SharePoint building icon into the file explorer (or share a link where it is explained). I only seem to be able to find sites where they explain how to map the SharePoint drive...
Thanks! It just pops up when you setup the sync. I have never had to do anything else to get it to show up there.
@@Xerillion Thanks - that worked. I hadn't done that last step in the setup process.
Hi, Just wondering if this structure was created in the document center or Teams template? This was a great demo and explanation about the best way to build and structure sharepoint to replace traditional file servers.
Thanks! It was created in SharePoint and what we'd recommend for companies moving if file servers. Though, these days at Xerillion we do all our document sharing and management in Microsoft Teams.
So two questions. What do you do when people put multiple subfolders into the document library? After 3-4 sub folders aren't you hitting the URL limit? How do you deal with the thresholds? Our company has 600 employees and each is responsible for 4 training documents. That puts us almost 1/2 way to the threshold and that's just the yearly training limit.
You are right - there is a 400 character path limit. A SharePoint purist (I'm NOT one - I"m more of a Teams guy these days..but of course that uses SharePoint document libraries too) would say sorting your files by subfolders going 4-5 levels deep isn't modern document management - tagging these documents with a label in their metadata is the what you should be doing. Instead of a user clicking down 4 levels of subfolders to organize their data, it would be simpler if they had one box with a drop down that represented the options for folder 1, then a second drop down for folder 2, and a 3rd for folder 3, and so on. Organizing and searching becomes much faster and easier. Still, I get changing a workflow for 600 users would be rough and probably not realistic. But then again, it would be compared to the cost of maintaining and refreshing a file server, BDR, VPN, you and your IT dept.'s all-in wage cost to maintain the existing system. SharePoint Online wins hand-down.
@@Xerillion excellent thanks for the comment. Unfortunately I am dealing with some personal who are stuck deep in the nested sub folder idea and some of their folders go 8 to 10 folders deep. It hasn't been easy.
Wow great Video!
Question: Do users really need OneDrive business to do their draft work and then once they have completed to move the file to SharePoint Share? Or can they work on their draft document directly on the sharepoint file share?
Thanks AR! Per your question, they can work on their drafts directly in the SharePoint Share (i.e., the document library).
Thank you! this is an amazing explanation!
thanks for the video, just a quick question on that, do you maybe know why after clicking sync on the web, only folders and sub folder structure gets visible in file explorer ? no files got synced , they all look like empty folders, not sure what went wrong.
It sounds to me like you have the sync set to "Free Up Space" instead of "Always Keep on this Device". My preference is to keep it on "Free Up Space" and let OneDrive determine what should be sync'd locally.
@@Xerillion it turned out the person who uploaded all stuff to sharepoint didnt check IN them, by default all documents are checked out.. so others can sync folder structure but not able to see any files under those folders...
Thanks for the video! Wondering what your take on cloud to cloud backup for sharepoint is? I'm being told even with all the versioning and retention that a backup such as barracuda is a must.
I don't think it is a requirement unless you are someone who does "backups of backups".
Perfect video Wayne. The content, pace and practicality was great! Can I ask an OTT question? What do you use to put your videos together incorporating demos, slides, S9 mirror and webcam? It would be perfect for building up some self-service training videos for my staff.
Hi! Thanks for the compliment! In this video I was just using Skype on my Surface Pro-which I wouldn't recommend to make videos, but I'm an IT guy, not a video guy 😃 and so this is what was what I was able to get working at the time. There is so much that goes into this beyond the camera and software as well. I'd recommended finding a course online that has a few hours of technical content to get you started for making videos. And- of course, to just gotta start and make your mistakes and learn 😃
What is the best way to migrate the bulk of the data?
Hi great video, thanks for posting it. I have only two cases of concern about how to replace old file servers with Sharepoint. It is the case of projects that deal very big files, say some Gb per file, or linked files, like GIS projects. In one case you could end up moving files of 20 Gb to the Sharepoint cloud, and quite a bunch of them, consuming a lot of space and also slowing down the access to these compared to a file server network. In the other case, I don't see how files that inherently work through references like GIS projects or Excel files with links, could be kept in shape once the migration occur, or even how they could be constructed while in the cloud if the paths that need to be handled are long URLs. Is the technology able to handle these cases?
Thanks! I agree about your comments on really big files. I call it 'the big file problem' and I go into it later on in the video. If you have an internet connection of a lower grade than a 50-100Mb fiber, you have the potential of damage to the large files due to latency-as you mention. Also, collaborating in large files becomes problematic. In those cases you will need a local file cache solution, doesn't need to be a full blown server. This is where we use Azure Active sync. So so other shared folders go to SharePoint document libraries, and file folders with big files go to Azure file sync with a local file cache.
@@Xerillion Many thanks for your reply! Will check into AD then. Best Regards.
I would like to discuss in more detail Sharepoint/One Drive and file sharing options and services. Currently, as a business we use an in-house file storage server that just houses a bunch of folders and each user of the company has permissions to specific folders and such, its a big mess BUT works. We are looking to move to the cloud but concerned with TOO MANY options in software like Sharepoint that we would NEVER use or need. Is it possible to start off just replicating the same structure we have on the file-sharing server in Sharepoint without doing all the additional stuff it has to offer? I myself can then use the additions and add what we feel would benefit us as a company later?
Hi Dakota, yes, you certainly can do what you are describing - and in fact, that is what most our of clients do. They take their shared folder file server structure and replicate it to SharePoint document libraries, or Teams Files. Teams Files is my preference in 2019. Both SharePoint document libraries and Teams Files can be then sync'd with OneDrive Files on Demand to make it look and feel like mapped drives in Windows File Explorer - and it works really well. It also feels comfortable for your users as it is the way they are used to working with files.
@@Xerillion Awesome! Currently we just moved our email from our in-house server to exchange on Office365. For this all to work this way what would we need to purchase? A Office365 business account? and that should give us access to Sharepoint & Onedrive for the same price? or do We need to purchase these as two different things? If email works better we can discuss more dmartin@idfi.com
Dakota, I just looped you in via email with Will from our sales team.
This all seems wonderful when using Microsoft products, but what to do when using other software that requires a file lock so two users aren't working on the same file at once? Can Sharepoint manage that for non-Microsoft products?
I don't know. If I were wondering that question, I'd have to check with the app developer in question to see if they explicitly have that support. If they don't explicitly state that, then I'd have to test it, which wouldn't be hard to do.
I stumbled across your video in my research for people expressing their experience on using sharepoint as an file server.
I am testing this method to replace our fileserver. Now I see that you mentioned that the drive will break sometimes, which I saw myself.
There is now a powershell script called "OneDriveMapper" which recreates on each login on the PC the link to sharepoint website and also deletes and recreates the sharepoint drive.
Do you think it will still break at some point?
Well, this is an old video and has since been replace with a newer video on moving your files to Microsoft Teams. We don't use the method described here anymore. We use OneDrive Files on Demand which looks close enough to a drive mapping.
Very nice and helpful video. Thank you. Next time maybe show the camera part only when needed, and maximize the PPT display or computer screen. Better to read for people.
Thanks Olly! In my next video coming out, I present my screen as the whole screen. I finally figured out how to do that in a way I can stay on the screen. I also figured out how to make the display clearer. This video here was made 2 years ago when I had no idea what I was doing, and it was recorded in 1 take using Skype for Business :)
Thank you for the wonderful video, it was really helpful. WE also run an on-premise file server which has got large size CAD drawings and high resolution images. If we migrated to SharePoint, does it work as our files requires fast processing. What do you recommend.?
Thanks Jasim! SharePoint won't work for the large CAD file scenario you mention. For that you'll need Azure File Sync. We'll have a video on that in the future. If you are in the US, you can talk with our team about a solution.
This is all good, however in a real life situation we’re not all working on a Windows OS client using Microsoft apps and docs.
We’re using Apple OSX and Adobe creative suite apps that have embedded links to resource files.
What about the permissions too ? How are sub-folder ACL’s managed? I skipped through the video and maybe I missed this but what’s the deal on setting sub-folder permissions for groups of users?
E.g. how do we map / translate sub-folder NTFS permissions of a traditional file server to that of Sharepoint?
A bit more information on security permissions and how this works would be good.
Many thanks
I cover my thoughts in the video relating to the questions you are asking. I'm not a fan of special sub-folder permissions in any situation - even when I used to put in file servers. They are messy and create security issues. I think, based on the questions you are asking, watching the entire video so you get the whole context would be helpful for you. I know it is a lot to watch, but IT is not simple - it is complex, especially modern enterprise cloud IT.
Hi! Is there any way to display all the root doc libraries on the home page of a site in one view without using the Site Contents view (that also shows other things like Site Assets and Style Libraries? Just the root folders like in your video, not the files.
Yes, this is a permissions thing. You see all of that in my video because I am an admin in my tenant.
So we were able to pull our files (somewhere near 300K plus folders) into SharePoint, however the sync runs constantly, sometimes with 15K changes in 24 hours. Any idea on how to fix this. We have multiple libraries, but 10-15 people who are all syncing them at the same time and most of them are using files on demand.
In our practice, we focus on keeping an individual user's sync under 300,000 items. Over 300,000 items and the sync will bog down as you are describing. So, the structure either needs to be adjusted to break the folders up so people aren't syncing everything, or they access though Teams or the SharePoint web app.
@@Xerillion that's what I was thinking too I just have to bring it to our management. Thanks
Hi, I found this to be a very helpful video and I've now managed to set up part of my companies file sharing on Sharepoint accessible through one drive. However we have a lot of excel workbooks that are linked to other excel workbooks and I don't think they'll work on Sharepoint accessed via Onedrive. I created a couple of excel workbooks and linked them within the Onedrive environment but then when I accessed the files via sharepoint online the links weren't present. Is this something that can be fixed? Or is it outside what the system can do?
Hi! I haven't tried it myself, though I suspect (and you have already tried) that you'll need to connect the links through a URL with corresponding permissions managed through Azure Active Directory. Again, you might have already tried it, but this is the route I'd be pursuing if we were faced with this, though we have not yet had to deal with this exact scenario.
Thanks for your helpful reply, I'll give it a try.
Excellent tutorial. Thank You!
You mentioned you have folders created by MS Teams (identified by the "- General" channel name). You have one (MS Teams Folder) for Sales, then a SharePoint Team Site named Sales also. I think this is going to be confusing for users. Shall we use Teams ONLY as a replacement for the fileserver, or try and cohabit Teams and SharePoint folders?
It depends on where you are starting and how motivated your company is to incorporate a modern workplace. In our case we went from a sales folder on a traditional file server to a sales document library in SharePoint, then moving to a sales Team with it's own Files tab. We no longer used the sales document library because Teams is so much more efficient and useful. It is a transition between 3 different systems. IT needs to lead the way WITH the FULL backing of FORWARD THINKING leadership.
Does the "free up space" and "keep it in my computer" works only on Windows 10? I tested on Windows 7 and there is no options like that (only options to Share, select what to sync and view online)
Hi Zobook, we don't use Windows 7 computers as they are end of life at this point. When we take on a new client, if there are any Windows 7 computers (rare), those get upgraded as part of the migration project. I do understand some companies are stuck with Windows 7 due to legacy apps they have not upgraded. In our practice though, we don't integrate these systems with Windows 7 computers.
Absolutely Brilliant explanation.
Q. I think you said (and others did) that it’s not good practice to map a drive to OneDrive or SharePoint as this link will break at some stage.
I did wonder though if it would be ok to point the location of the users documents folder to their Business OneDrive folder?
This would mean the default documents save location is still in their OneDrive folder by default, which is still a local folder, but being synchronised to cloud?
Or is this likely to cause issues?
Thanks! My suggestion would be to turn on the PC backup feature in OneDrive they will backup My Documents. I mention this in my updated 'files in Office 365' video I posted this past January.
@@Xerillion Thank you for replying to my question. I have view the clips you mention, but still have not got clarity.
The instructions you show still have the “Documents” folder
and "One Drive - Company" as separate locations. I was wanting to point the "Documents" folder location from "C:\Users\Username\Documents" to a Documents folder in the path of the One Drive folder. This way if the user saves to the default "Documents" folder, it is still stored in One Drive.
Scratch that, I see now what you mean with the backup option.
How do you deal with the path. The standard path is C:\Users\User\My Sharepoint Folder. In an organisation it is common and necessary to have the same path for every folder and file. How do I do that? The problem is also that several users can work on one PC and it should work even then.
I would appreciate an answer. Thank you.
Hmm...I don't understand your question "How do you deal with the path." I think I need more context to be able to see if I can answer the question.
Wayne, what do you think about using a mailbox's Onedrive for Business folder to store departmental files instead of a Team Site ? The advantage of doing this is avoidance of Sharepoint Online storage costs at a hefty $0.2/GB/month. For example I can create a mailbox called Finance, allocate it up to 5 TB storage space in Onedrive for Business (OfB), migrate the Finance department's file server data to default document library (Documents) in OfB using the Sharepoint Migration Tool, then sharing the document library out to staff. Do you see any pitfalls to doing this instead of using a Team Site ? Thanks
Hi H.O. King - OneDrive is configured as a user's personal business files. It won't work well as a shared department folder- and I have seen it tried before. In your case, I'd use Microsoft Teams to create the Office 365 Group for the General channel, and that will create the document library you need, and your users can sync with (Admining document libraries in Teams is easier than using the SharePoint Online portal). I'd "map" the drives to the document libraries your users need on their computers. Your users will then have a real mapping to the file server and a "look-alike" mapping to the document library. From there you make the shared folder read-only; no new files go here - they go to the Sharepoint document library. If they want to work with old files, they need to copy them from the read-only file server to the "mapping" in SharePoint. You can leave it like this if you want, or explain they have 90 days to migrate the files they need, and after 90 days you'll turn off the shared file server folder, at which point the file server folder just becomes an archive they can always retrieve data from if they need it. This strategy DRAMATICALLY cleans up your shared folders that have decades of irrelevant files and a messy file structure.
Xerillion Hi Wayne, I’m curious to know why you think OfB isn’t a good solution for a shared departmental folder. What sort of problems did you observe with this approach ? I understand that Microsoft intend to offer unlimited OfB storage space once again (quite frankly 5 TB per user is unlimited to all intents and purposes, and they will increase this to 25 TB at no extra cost if you ask), so its extremely tempting to use this for shared data. MS Teams is great but it lives on SharePoint Online and therefore additional storage for it must be bought at $0.2/GB/month. Thanks for your insight.
@@HOKING-ef8dj When I saw it deployed by a previous IT person, multiple people were logging in with the same credentials to sync the files and it was messy. If your company has 40TB of file data, that is really huge. I'd go with the approach I mentioned above.
How do you face the issue /limit where you reach 5000 items and hit the list view limit...The 5000 item list view threshold error can be a pain.
Interested to know your work around for this.
I mentioned it in a few other responses - but we don't do a "wholesale" copy of file server files to SharePoint or Teams. We us this project to "clean house".
One question, how do you protect against new ransomware that for some reason an end-user got compromised and could affect the entire doc library?
I have not seen it happen yet, though if you have retention policies in place, you'll always be able to recover files from the presentation hold library.
What i struggle with is: we migrated our files using mover io, from one user, directly into the sharepoint documents. The thing is, we can't remove or adapt ACL's, because theres to many items. Is there a migration strategy somewhere on how to setup the acl structure and properly migrate the files?
What I tell IT Pro's is to not do a simple transfer. When you do this project it's time to clean house on your file shares and thoughtfully build your new "shares" in Teams with new ACL's, ect.
Amazing video Wayne! We're in the process the migrating our companies file server to SharePoint libraries using the SharePoint migration tool. However, tons of our users are running into sync issues. Do you have any preparation tips to perform before migrating files to avoid sync issues?
Yeah, we scan the file server folders for do many different things before migrating. Besides the characters SharePoint doesn't like, there are path length considerations, and a 300,000 file sync limit on overdrive to deal with.
Hello did you create a separate document library for each main folder i.e accounting, Sales
Yes
Hi Wayne, i'm realizing that i've been trying to use sharepoint through onedrive instead of going through sharepoint. By default, is there a cap on the size of document library in sharepoint? If so what are the cost related to expanding the storage? My company is pretty large but i haven't ask the system admin. With onedrive, we're limited to 1TB. Thank you for the informative walkthrough.
Just Google search something like "sharepoint online limits" and you'll get the information you are looking for. There is some huge limit, and you will pay 20 cents per GB/month after you pass the allotment you get with your subscription.
Is there anyway I can sync my sharepoint folders that I choose, sync to all my users in the company (not download, just sync). I do not want to have to walk to over 200 computers and do this manually for every single user.
Yes, there is. You need an Intune configuration policy.
How do you get that SharePoint folder in your file explorer?
You can get the OneDrive link through the desktop version of OneDrive but how’d you get the Sharepoint one?
You use OneDrive Sync.
Great video Wayne. Going to invest a lot more time in this. You mentioned about active directory to. Is there a way to put that into 365 and get pcs joined to the cloud domain?
Absolutely. That is known as Azure Ad Join, and part of the solution to manage devices.
Thanks, thats cool but can i use this with any 365 account with the need to sign up to azure ad?
Sorry without the need to sign up to azure ad...
Gotcha, you know, I'm actually not sure of that as we really only do Microsoft 365 Enterprise any more, which include Azure AD Premium. If you wanted to just go straight Office 365 without EMS, it would be easy to test an Azure AD Join.
Cheers I will try it and post back
Excellent demos and points!
We are trying to set up sharepoint for our company but I am having issues figuring out how to only allow the Accounting group to have access to the accounting files. Do you have a video about permissions?
This is one of my earliest videos I ever made. I made an updated one last year that goes in depth: th-cam.com/video/ZrIGdLz1-p0/w-d-xo.html
Hi, we have moved on to Office 365 using a file sever and cloud backup. How sophisticated is the SharePoint backup? e.g we have daily, weekly, monthly and annual mirror cloud backup.
Hi Eugene, Office 365 uses retention policies, not backups. I have another video on here about the subject. Check it out and post in the video comments if you have any questions.
Can you please suggest on how to handle UNCs and File Links while migrating?
There is no way around it...they will have to be reset and resetting them to URL's will take some testing...testing and patience. My experience so far is clients ultimately give up trying to modify documents with lots of UNC links to URL links. If a client has high dependency on those types of legacy documents, your probably stuck with setting up an Azure virtual network and using Azure Files or a Windows Server VM, and connecting to them with a VPN or Windows Virtual Desktop depending on internet bandwidth, and your latency between your LAN and the Azure datacenter region your virtual network is in.
A HUGE thank you for this.
How does Sharepoint handle links? Like my accountants link other files within excel docs so they can quickly open them. Or even link data from other excel docs and aggregate them into one file. Can they do this?
Well, I guess it depends if you and your accountants are in the same Azure AD tenant or not. If yes, you can just change the file share links to URL's.
We have virtual desktops which have their local drives as network drives and can't really install the one drive client. What is the best way we can replace our fileserver with onedrive? Not easy to map directly to onedrive. Any recommendation greatly appreciated!
Hi Peter - It is still doable, and we have done it several times in an RDS deployment. You don't really "map" to OneDrive, but you make it look like mapping so users feel comfortable in File Explorer, and can drag/drop files like they are used to. The "mapping" is really a sync technology (which is superior to drive mapping). With OneDrive Files on Demand, you then don't have to sync everything - just the stuff the user needs. OneDrive will sync all the names of the files so it *looks* like the files are there and they can search on it, but in fact only the files they really need are taking up any space. Then you get all the benefits of SharePoint (retention policies, classification and labeling, data loss prevention, versioning, deep search, Windows Information Protection, ect.).
I need to provide access to the invoices folder to a person. It is located under clients / client / finance / bookkeeping / payables / invoices. This doesn't work in Teams without creating a group. Works fine on Box. User only sees invoices.
Hi Rick. My perspective is this: you are trying to apply old school file server folder access controls to Teams, and that won't work. A team, in Teams, is based off groups that collaborate together with modern workflows. The team that should be created in your example is "Bookkeeping" (for us it is "Accounting") and everyone on that team will have access to all files. We have another team called Finance and everyone in Finance had access to all the files. Granting access control for a single user 5 nested subfolders down is not good access control management and I would not recommend it. Defining your access controls in a modern way with Teams is much cleaner and more secure. Designing shared file structure in Teams requires a shift in thinking.
@@Xerillion Thanks for the reply. Yes, I have tried a number of schemes over the years having been an early adopter of box.
I have no issue using security groups (ms teams), but they should allow us to rename the first channel.
I did look at SharePoint years ago, but got lost in it creating a lot of mess.
I am now migrating over to SharePoint to keep all our processes in one place.
I'll revisit our best practices now that MS is catching up to the rest of the SaaS community.
Thanks again.
Than
Have you ever used Brandfolder for DAM? If so do you think SharePoint works as an alternative - especially since you can add a user to a folder who doesn't have a 365 account?
Hi Olivia - yes, I do think it is a good alternative, and with SharePoint (or Teams Files), you can add guests who do not have 365 accounts as well.
Hi, What a great video! We are working on doing this exact thing now for our company data (around 20TBs) We've got everything you have (Sharepoint Online, OneDrive sync Tool, Document Libraries arranged) however, I am not seeing the cloud icons or the option to "free up space" and manage the storage of items locally. Any ideas why this would not be working or not be visible?
20TB! Wow! Well, this was a OneDrive update earlier in the year. I'm wondering if you have the latest version of the OneDrive client?
Hi, just in case anyone else combs through these for helpful info (Thank you for the great video), if you have the latest OneDrive app, it's probably just a matter of enabling "Files on Demand" on the first tab of the OneDrive client. I had the same question & after checking this, I now see the those icons.
Are these files accessible on mobile devices? I have the OneDrive app and my company is currently using Box Sync with a phone app to access the files from a mobile device. Will I lose that functionality if we were to switch to Sharepoint from Box Sync?
Completely accessible on mobile devices if you want them to be.
Great video. But what if a laptop with a synced OneDrive is stolen? Those files are still on the hard drive. Currently using a network share without syncing, there are no files stored on the Laptop or PC. Is there a way to not sync anything to the computer, but still see the files that are in the cloud using OneDrive?
Thanks D! A few things I'd say: the classic case of the computer gets stolen or loss is what disk encryption is used for (i.e, Windows Bitlocker). At Xerillion, Intune checks Windows/IOS/Android OS devices connecting to our cloud services for encryption and if that check fails the user is not allowed to connect with that device through a conditional access policy - even if they are a valid user. Also, with OneDrive Files on Demand, you only need to sync the files are using. You don't need to sync the entire folder.
just remember to select free up space for your one drive before you shut down the laptop, and change your password if the laptop is missing.
How does file sync work on shared devices, like shared laptops in a school?
It replicates the files to those devices when it gets online.
We have migrated file server data to SharePoint online teams site with onprem permission. is there any way so that we can create list content permission on that site, person can open site and view site document directory but can't read any file. only able to access allowed Folders.
Hi Rajesh - interesting question, though I don't know the quick answer on that as I haven't tried it.
Great Demo, I would say you still need a backup solution though? What about malicious user actions such as moving folders around etc. It's not just about deleting. I would still want to use a 3rd party backup solution.
Hey Matt! Regarding backups - in Office 365/SharePoint Online/OneDrive - you don't manage a backup system, you manage retention policies - which are much more powerful than backups. Retention policies make backups look archaic. I go over this very point in this video here on my channel "How to "Backup" Emails and Files in Office 365 for FREE" : th-cam.com/video/zr1XiSC_aXA/w-d-xo.html
@@Xerillion . I was just thinking if a disgruntled user decided to move the folder structure around heavily, a better get out would be to restore the layout if you are dealing with a layout of 100's of folders nested. I wasn't aware you could do this without something like Veeam, or CloudAlly
@@Sailing_Reality I understand. I haven't looked back at permissions in a few months, and haven't had to look at this issue specifically, though I believe there is a permission around if someone can modify folder structures. -Wayne
@@Sailing_Reality You raised a good question so I had to look. I think this is what you are looking for? social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/7ff24b56-a50d-4343-bf3a-5732ab035331/preventing-users-from-deleting-any-list-item-or-folder-from-all-share-point-listslibraries?forum=sharepointdevelopment
@@Sailing_Reality One of my engineers literally posted this this morning in Teams - I think you'll like this: techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Files-restore-for-SharePoint-and-Microsoft-Teams/ba-p/480760?ranMID=24542&ranEAID=je6NUbpObpQ&ranSiteID=je6NUbpObpQ-QNgRXX2CAV3cRcJHGLDtAw&epi=je6NUbpObpQ-QNgRXX2CAV3cRcJHGLDtAw&irgwc=1&OCID=AID681541_aff_7593_1243925&tduid=(ir__d3glw92ecgkfrk39xc1u9inwzv2xmpr23lwu6aj100)(7593)(1243925)(je6NUbpObpQ-QNgRXX2CAV3cRcJHGLDtAw)()&irclickid=_d3glw92ecgkfrk39xc1u9inwzv2xmpr23lwu6aj100
Wayne, I have been looking into a OneDrive and SharePoint solution for a client of mine. I have posted a few questions on reddit and each time I post I receive two major sticking points. 1. Complaints about files with long file names 2. 300k file limit for larger clients. What do you do for your clients regarding these limitations?
When we migrate clients, we review their folders and files to look for the problems you mention. Normally, client's file servers are huge mess - and they know it and they want to clean it up. So, 50% of the time, we do not simply copy everything over. The client only copies over files they need, and then the old file server becomes an archive. This is my preferred method as well; then you don't have the issues you are referring to.
was hoping you'd go over best practice for permissions.
Hi Dan, thanks for the input. This video is 2 years old and these days, we move file servers to Microsoft Teams. Here it is: th-cam.com/video/ZrIGdLz1-p0/w-d-xo.html and I discuss permissions, but bottom line is that Teams makes permissions and access controls extremely easy. I would only do SharePoint document libraries at this point if someone needs very granular access control requirements.
@@Xerillion I started watching it just now. Haha it's funny to watch these videos back to back because things you were super thrilled/talked highly about on this video, you'd very monotone and annoyed with them in the next video. Crazy what
@@apartmentexpertsdrh :)