Background:
- At work we use MS Office, because who doesn’t. We used to have a central file server with lots of well sorted directories.
- Then Corporate decided to ditch that, everything must move into OneDrive so there’s always a Data Owner.
- The local boss had to move everything from the network share into his own OneDrive, and then share, with each of us, the folders that were relevant to each of us.
- This sounds like distributed storage, which is probably smart in some way.
In reality, it’s shit. Everything is now a link to “corporateName.sharepoint.com” in the browser, and it’s a hassle to find that in the file explorer. SOmeone just shared a folder with me. I see it in my browser. How do I get it from the browser into a normal folder view? Should I forget about on-disk storage; is everything today just a browser bookmark?
Worse, I have no idea what’s where. Some people share some stuff and somehow it ends up in my OneDrive, but what’s the context of it?
This seems so wrong to me. Am I just not “getting” it??
It. Is. The. Worst.
Someone shares a file directly, another shares the whole folder, someone else makes a Team, which automatically creates its own sharepoint site that has its own document library. Now someone else shares a file via a Community sharepoint site they have, which is somehow different than a Teams site. The Community site also has its own document library.
Oh and sharepoint is also onedrive? But also isn’t, somehow. I never know. I can sync some stuff to one onedrive folder, and some to another onedrive folder. But it’s all also the same.
To answer your question, you are not alone.
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I’m pretty sure in an Enterprise Environment OneDrive is just a SharePoint Frontend.
OneDrive is really just an alias for a networked drive that points to a cloud location and is baked into every instance of Windows. Most OneDrive instances are for personal computers and they’re inaccessible to everyoen else. But you can manually share files.
SharePoint is a flexible enterprise website and fileserver for an organization to customize.
Teams is a Slack ripoff that allows employees to create teams with channels within those teams, and freeform chats. It also has a filesharing component to it.
It is awful to work around the half-dozen ways to store and share files. Really. Microsoft needs to unfuck this.
Teams isn’t JUST a Slack ripoff. It’s a Slack spinoff, to the point they share assets in AppData.
Which means that if you install both and then uninstall one or the other… well… let’s just say I spent a while on manual cleanup and then never reinstalled either.
The difference between one drive and SharePoint is their intended use, nothing physical.
OneDrive is for personal files you occasionally want to collab on. Sharepoint is for collaborative files you want occasionally restrict. They have opposite purposes and are tooled around those purposes.
Both are sitting on the same hardware and have very similar underpinnings, but their front ends serve two distinct purposes.
So are the files in Teams on SharePoint? And searchable through SharePoint?
If I search keywords in OneDrive vs the same search in SharePoint. Would it give different results? Or would it search everything I’m allowed to see anyway?
A lot of your frustrations are stemming from your M365 environment being misconfigured. While all that is possible behavior, in a well-configured environment it makes sense and works well. It sounds like many of the features that are open there should in reality be restricted in order to allow a better user experience as much of that function is unneeded by your particular group.
This is definitely true. My M365 environment has a huge number of users, and the admins have no idea what they’re doing. It’s a big mess. But that’s a red flag imo, such a massive and widely used platform should be more consistent in how they name things and how their features interact.
A lot of that comes down to training. Not every product can be boiled down to phone app simplicity. I mean that being said though, I do think Sharepoint could use a much clearer interface overall. I think MS is working on the consistency part but with so many moving parts it feels chaotic at times. But I’ve seen things becoming clearer and more cohesive over the last few years. It’s still light years ahead of a platform like GCP though. That thing is a nightmare in digital.
This constant bundling is crazy for actually finding things. Always like four places to check.