In my previous blog post I reviewed how I’ve seen a trend in organizations migrating to the Microsoft 365 platform with the requirement of maintaining a consistent mapped drive experience for users. Before reading this blog, I’d recommend reading that blog post here to gain an understanding the difference between the past on-premises and Microsoft 365 experiences.
For this How To, we’ll be staying within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It’s important to note that you can utilize Group Policy or do “one off” syncs for specific users, but this tutorial is going to focus on syncing drives for specific business units/departments within an organization.
To perform the setup, you’ll need administrative permissions for SharePoint and Microsoft Endpoint Management (Also known as Intune.) We’ll also be assuming that SharePoint and Teams have already been configured within the environment.
It’s extremely important to note that the design of SharePoint and Teams is critical to these configurations, as you’ll need team sites to align properly with organizational business units and groups. If it’s expected that your SharePoint instance is not designed/configured correctly, that should be fixed first as it will change the links/configurations/sync for all of the below.
Collecting Required information:
To start, we’ll need to grab information regarding the Team Directories we want to sync by getting the library ID for each site we want to sync. To get this information:
- Go to the Document library of the site you want to sync
- Click the Sync button at the top of the screen.
- Select the Copy Library ID link
- Paste the information into a notepad or other word document
- Be sure to clearly identify what site the library ID goes to if you plan to sync/map more than a few libraries.
Typical output format from copying the library ID should resemble a string similar to the bellow:
tenantId=1818bf5a%5D3575%2D4967%2Da2fb%2Da9424b466454&siteId=%7B01fae804%2D4c67%2D4cd5%2Db19a%2D7a31d755fcef%7D&webId=%7Bd798b0b1%2D9a8f%2D4f30%2D9c76%2Df130c8859005%7D&listId=%7B35122153%2D5F90%2D4258%2DA11B%2D4B711FBD168C%7D&webUrl=https%3A%2F%2Flloydtoday%2Esharepoint%2Ecom%2Fsites%2Team&version=1
Once you have all the libraries from the sites you’d like to sync, we’ll begin configuring Microsoft Endpoint Management configuration policies to deploy the drives to your users.
Deployment of Drives to Devices Through Intune:
- Within the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin Center located at https://endpoint.microsoft.com Go to Devices -> Windows -> Configuration Profiles
- Create a new Administrative Template and provide a proper name and description for the drives you are mapping
- Important note: Drives put into a policy currently use permissions-based access, so if a user does not have access to a site it will not map to the computer. This however does not stop the drive from attempting to map on a computer.
- Because of this it is recommended to separate these configuration policies logically to minimize the amount of drives that try to sync to a computer.
- Change the following under Computer settings:
- In the OneDrive folder tree:
- Configure “Team site libraries to sync automatically”
- Enable the setting
- In the Libraries section at the bottom of the settings
- Add the Name of the Library
- This will replace what used to be the Drive Letter
- Its not uncommon to see a single letter used in this instance to match the on-prem experience and ease the transition for end users even further.
- This will replace what used to be the Drive Letter
- Add the Library ID in the Value section
- This is the Value/Library ID you previously gathered in the first step.
- Add the Name of the Library
- Press OK to apply your settings
- Configure the “Convert Synced team site files to online-only files” setting
- Enable this setting
- This will save room on end user computers, by only having files download when required by the users and is highly recommended.
- Enable this setting
- Review Other settings:
- While other settings aren’t required for the configuration to work it is recommended to review the configuration items that may prove useful to your organization.
- Configurations that have often proven useful for organization in the past include:
- Block File downloads when users are low on disk space
- Exclude specific kinds of files from being uploaded
- Prompt users when they delete multiple OneDrive files on their local computer
- Silently move Windows known folder to OneDrive
- Note – This is particularly useful in “backing up” local files for users and reducing reliance on end user devices.
- Configurations that have often proven useful for organization in the past include:
- While other settings aren’t required for the configuration to work it is recommended to review the configuration items that may prove useful to your organization.
- Configure “Team site libraries to sync automatically”
- In the OneDrive folder tree:
- Assign the Policy to the proper user group on the next page.
- Reminder that these policies utilize permissions to map, so unless devices are assigned permission to files in the Team sites (which would be an irregular configuration.) the sites will not sync.
- Exclude any groups as required
- Review and Save the Configuration.
- Wait
- This is critical, unless a device has just enrolled into Microsoft Endpoint Management policies by default only refresh once every 8 hours, and some of those policies require a reboot to take effect.
- There are manual ways to force the replication, but it’s important to note that replication needs to occur within the Microsoft Endpoint Management backend ecosystem first to ensure the device receives the latest update.
- Reboot the machine, login and validate the drives are synced.
If the drives do not show, check the event logs and synchronized policies on the device they often point to policy not yet being obtained, conflicts, or a deeper issue with the devices ability to communicate with Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
When all is working the users should now be able to access their files in a typical Windows Explorer window, in Teams, or on the corresponding SharePoint site!
If at any point in this article you questioned that you are configuring items correctly, or that SharePoint is designed correctly, it’s recommended to consult with an expert or Microsoft partner to validate the environment is properly configured and no other issues exists that would prevent the synchronization.
