Apparently Microsoft has changed how Office 365 business users access OneDrive. We maintain an Enterprise E3 plan Office 365 account. I noticed recently the link for OneDrive had been removed from our SharePoint Online user interface (UI). Not only had the link been removed from the Global Navigation set of links on our site, but three new sets of links had been added to our site template, on a horizontal bar located above the global navigation links: Sites Office 365 and a grid-like symbol (or checkerboard), with neither a title, nor a mouse-hover description It appears this new section of…
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OneDrive for Business
Lots of interest in OneDrive for Business at Office 365 Summit, New York
At the Office 365 Summit in New York City, a lot of the discussion in the Adoption track focused on learning more about OneDrive for Business. Cynthia Wade, the leader of the track spent a lot of time fielding topics on OneDrive for Business. From the level of interest her audience exhibited in the topic, OneDrive for Business likely represents the primary basis for user interaction with Office 365 for most larger organizations in the fall of 2014. The reliability of any estimate of how users are actually consuming Microsoft’s Office cloud, SaaS offer was reinforced by a set of…
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For organizations with many users on OneDrive for Business, drafting a list of policies and approved procedures makes sense
OneDrive for Business has, at its core, the structure of a document library for SharePoint Online. But several unique features have been added to this cloud, SaaS. So organizations with many OneDrive for Business users will benefit from a formal set of policies and procedures. The most prominent of the additional features of OneDrive for Business is its increased storage capacity. Each OneDrive for Business tenant can store up to 1TB in the system. But this much storage can prove to be a support headache if not managed properly. Since versioning is not turned on, by default, unless users are…
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Working with OneDrive for Business is More Productive when SharePoint Online Users have Realistic Expectations
Microsoft has expanded user accessibility to Office Online to include not only smart phones and tablets powered by Microsoft operating systems, but also iOS and Android devices. Nevertheless, Office Online performance is not uniform across all of these devices. So SharePoint Online stakeholders, administrators and power users should set reasonable expectations for end users, to ensure adoption does not suffer as the result of deploying OneDrive for Business and Office Online apps. This writer recently tested performance of Excel Online on: a PC running Windows 7, Professional with 8 GBs of RAM a PC running Windows 8.1, Professional with 12…
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Comments on Office 365 Network Architecture for Sites and OneDrive for Business
Over recent posts to this blog, this writer has explored OneDrive for Business as a uniquely featured SharePoint Online document library. An effort has also been made to report on some of the special features of this component of Office 365 and some methods of automating some tasks, associated with OneDrive for Business, likely to be repetitive for users. It may be helpful to our readers to take a post, or two, to discuss how this special library is positioned within Office 365 network architecture. The rationale is simple: an effort was made to build a very simple workflow to…
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More on Quick Steps for OneDrive for Business, Office 365
An entry to the help section of Microsoft’s Office web site titled “Automate common or repetitive tasks with Quick Steps” presents this new feature of OneDrive for Business, as originally introduced with Outlook 2010. As the article makes clear, Quick Steps were intended to reduce the repetitive nature of performing tasks, for users, with automation very similar to workflows. But what is very different between the two versions is the lack “packaged” repetitive actions in the OneDrive for Business version of this feature. As this writer wrote in an earlier post to this blog, Quick Steps for OneDrive for Business…
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Understanding the Potential of OneDrive for Business for Enterprise Document and Content Management
OneDrive for Business is not simply another cloud storage offer. It is a combination of features enterprise business will likely want to explore to ensure optimum value is captured from implementing this cloud offer. Microsoft provides a lot of this information via several articles on its Technet website. In Plan for OneDrive for Business in SharePoint Server 2013, Microsoft presents the OneDrive for Business solution architecture: “The OneDrive for Business architecture includes storage locations (both document libraries in SharePoint Server 2013 and Windows folders on the client workstation), and the OneDrive for Business Windows Sync client” (quote from the above…
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