As organizations migrate core services such as email, chat, and files to the cloud one of the most common requests that I’ve received during design sessions comes in regard to moving file repositories to SharePoint Online. “How do we maintain our mapped drives and the user experience?”
Past Experience and Configurations
In the past a file services implementation or migration would translate to mapping drives using traditional practices where a letter is assigned to a specific network location. For file servers this would translate to correlating a letter such as “S” to a location such as ftp:\\FileServer\Files\Share. For on-premises SharePoint locations similarly the “S” letter would get mapped to a web location such as “https://SharePoint/Site/Files”.
The result of these configurations would be that users could use a familiar File Explorer experience to access files and folders, while maintaining a central file repository that IT admins could backup and version accordingly.
While these configurations worked well in the past they still had their drawbacks. One commonly noted drawback was that there were only so many available letters in the alphabet to map to a computer, and even logically separating the drive maps would also lead to overlap and administrative issues for users that may have membership in multiple business units that span across these logical groups. Additionally, On-Premises SharePoint URLs could easily exceed file naming constraints of the Windows Operating system, requiring reconfiguration of file locations or their naming conventions to remediate issues.
Addressing Hybrid Work with Microsoft 365
Despite the drawbacks of mapping drives, these were easily configurable through Group Policy and provided an experience all users could easily understand and use. But as the workforce has become more distributed, and COVID-19 accelerated remote work requirements, typical group policy started to encounter issues in applying, which is often the case with limited line of site and bandwidth to servers. This resulted in end user machines unable to acquire the configurations required for mapped drives and other issues such as Password Resets not being recognized by the end user device.
Many organizations expected their Virtual Private Networks (VPN) would still provide the line of site required for machines to get the group policy configurations and resolve the other issues such as password resets being recognized by the end user computer immediately after it was performed. This however was not reliable and often required an “Always on” VPN configuration for Machine based policies to be recognized as user initiated VPNs often did not connect to servers early enough, or for a long enough time for required policies to be obtained.
This and compounding other issues, like administrators not being local to the data centers required that organizations adopt a cloud based, highly available infrastructure and services. Many organizations turned to the Microsoft 365 solution, which takes us back to the question: “How do you provide the same mapped drive experience for users?”
Many administrators immediately fall back to past experiences and look to configure mapped drives using SharePoint URLs and drive letters. There are issues with this configuration though, as the connection typically isn’t stable enough over an internet connection to maintain connectivity and Microsoft themselves do not recommend the configuration. As administrators experience these issues they are quick to dismiss the idea of mapping SharePoint drives and push for users to re-learn how to use files and folders through SharePoint and Teams.
But the truth is the migration to Microsoft 365 provides administrators with the opportunity to regain control over files and folders which may have lost their previously defined structure while still providing the same user experience.
The Solution, Syncing Team Document Libraries
OneDrive, which utilizes SharePoint Online for its backend infrastructure provides us with a sync agent that we can utilize to “map” drives for Teams sites as well to re-create the mapped drive experience. (While the connect nomenclature is that we are “syncing” the drives, many still consider this a mapping of the files and folders.)
This new experience has similar drawbacks from the older mapped drive experience, but as they did in the past, the advantages often provide a greater reward for IT admins and users. Understanding the drawbacks ahead of migrating files to SharePoint online will allow organizations to avoid many of the issues commonly associated with syncing Teams sites to devices.
Some Drawbacks to the Solution:
- There are still restrictions on file name length
- Utilizing the Sync agent will create stub folders on end user computers which can take up additional space on end user computers
- SharePoint Online has restrictions on storage, and additional storage might be needed based on large file repositories
- Internet connections are generally slower than LAN connections which can lead to a mis-match in document versions between end user computers and SharePoint Online.
Some Advantages of the Solution:
- Drive letters are no longer used, allowing for additional mapped drives
- Files can be restructured to align with organizational business units, simplifying the permission process.
- Files are now accessible remotely, and through multiple applications (file explorer, Teams, SharePoint.)
- The new experience makes it easy for users to understand the difference between Company files and personal files.
- Integration with Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance give organizations better control over their data and visibility into how its being used.
- Microsoft SharePoint provides built in versioning and AI providing a layer of protection against ransomware attacks
Conclusion
With proper planning organizations can maintain the existing user experience while moving their core services to highly available cloud services which provide greater security and compliance capabilities that are being required by governing entities and expected by end users and partners.
In future blog posts we’ll review how to configure the experience using Intune, and SharePoint.
