The mistake of using SharePoint sites in Windows Explorer!

Recently we received an enquiry from a new law firm which was de-merging. Initially, their data was on ‘Dropbpox for Business’. Since the data requirement for a new fileserver was a few hundred gigabytes we suggested them a mid-range NAS appliance. However, given the advent of the pandemic it simply did not make sense to have anything on-premises. Here we leveraged their existing O365 subscription to build for them an Online fileserver. Story follows…. 🙂

Given this requirement we looked at the Office 365 subscription, which gives a 1TB of SharePoint Online (SPO) storage for the entire organization, in addition to the 10GB per user. A demo was given to them with a few SharePoint libraries and the response was quite positive. Since initial data on their old company was on Dropbox, SharePoint Migration tool was used to migrate their data in incremental cycles to the target SharePoint libraries. On the cutover day we mapped the users to SharePoint libraries to let them have the same look and feel of accessing the earlier Dropbox folders.

The Problem:

This action turned out to be a bad decision for the network. SharePoint online users OAuth to access the data which made the network noticeably slow at peak times.

The Solution:

Leveraging the 1TB per user OneDrive space we then trained the users to sync only the required SharePoint libraries to OneDrive which completely reversed the user experience. They now don’t just get the benefit of intelligent sync features of OneDrive saving valuable disk space on a local systems which come with smaller disks these days, but also just sync only the required top level folders. The top-level folders in the original Dropbox were created as Site Collections in SharePoint and the Down-level as libraries.

As for SPO its important you create a Home site and link the other site collection as a hubsite. This way if the user gets lost in the SPO world he/she can work their way out to find a required library and sync them back.

The Pros:

You maintain the same hierarchy of folders in SPO

You can now control the permissions on different libraries using the Azure/O365 users single sign on

The Cons:

Since one of the folders had upto 200+ client folders created as down-level libraries assuming a user needing access to all of them(lets say the manager) has to manually sync each library for the first time. Of course, the clock keeps ticking itself after the first initial sync but imagine doing this repetitively for 200 libraries. Multiply this by the number of users needing the same set of libraries. Microsoft should have a way to synchronize complete site collection

When synching a particular library within a site collection, the hierarchy of the each down-level folder is seen as a top level in Windows explorer. I guess there should be an alternative way to make these libraries visible in the same fashion as they are in the SPOnline.

There is a lag between when the permission is assigned and when the user is allowed or denied access to the actual resource. One would expect instant revocation or assigning of rights to a folder/file once assigned/revoked.

The Verdict:

Overall it was a fun experience having the client on SPO and finally the customer was satisfied and more than happy with the cost savings it brings minus the on-prem fileserver management benefits (which is no longer required). SPO is all about user experience.

Would definitely recommend it as an alternative for fileserver for SMBs if not large enterprises!

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