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OneDrive & SharePoint

Welcome​

The goal of this Perspective Document is to provide a knowledge and understanding of OneDrive and SharePoint in the Office 365 services. This is a document that is written from a more philosophical view than that of a technical breakdown, and does not necessarily dive into direct causation and troubleshooting of specific issues but discusses the mechanical foundations of OneDrive and SharePoint as as system. For guidance regarding specific issues, please review to my Documentation as this is a Perspective Based Document.

Why I hate OneDrive​

OneDrive is the problem child of file syncing services, not because of the design of the service but because of the variety of users.

I understand that any file larger than 8MB is transferred via BITS, that's great to hear. It's really cool that OneDrive uses the WNP API alongside a REST API in order to use HTTP requests and a BITS protocol to manage all the different types of files stored.

I know that there are special application designs with Office Programs that allow the file downloads to be managed by the Office Software itself - which in turn allows for collaboration on files and a session based service with Office File Formats. I really do think that's great.

I love that the character limit for a file path is 400 characters, when the OS limit is only 250 characters - because it reminds me that sometimes data can become too nested.

My problem isn't OneDrive, or the beauty of it's design that can be often overlooked - my problem and passionate distaste towards this beast of burden is simply the nature of our encounters. OneDrive is only ever not working, and when it's not working it's for critical files and essential resources.

Were these essential resources or critical files accessible via the 365 web app at any time? Yes. Will this information and quick fix for the solution ever be enough? No

I hate OneDrive because the program has been designed so well and so beautifully within the Windows OS Environment that it means when something is wrong with OneDrive... it is very rarely a result of the program itself and more often than not it is a result of a miss configuration from the user.

I hate OneDrive because the program was inherently designed to empower the user, and to provide the best experience possible that Microsoft can manage to bundle together for your standard licensing. It does exactly that, and the path towards enlightenment is often painted with the familiar fear of change.

I hate OneDrive because it has caused so many issues by not doing anything wrong that I've started to develop a non-sensical sympathy for an impossible software. Maybe I could blame the lack of user warnings, but it would be naïve of me to blame what is a perfectly functional product with an alarming amount of documentation and guidance available on the software in such a way.

Why OneDrive should not be hated​

In an effort to best understand the madness that is a litany of errors, issues and general complaints regarding OneDrive as a service it's important to take into account the scope of it's userbase and respect the context of it's application.

Many services will integrate OneDrive as an additional tool and not something that is built into the core principals of a workflow. This is due to the natural structures of certain industries and is a result of their pre-existence before technologies such as OneDrive existed.

This creates a problem as OneDrive is in many cases being retroactively applied to a series of workflows that are not always compliant with the purpose of OneDrive.

In an ideal world, before any data is generated and users are setup for a tenancy the responsible tenants would have a plan to organise and structure the virtual environment. This means that there would be a separation of Hubs such as HR, General Staff, Admin, ext. and the access to all of these resources would be:

  • Separated by the permissions of the Hubs
  • Empower the users to control their environment
  • Enable functionality between different Hubs

This is not always an ideal world, and sometimes the configuration is instead:

  • Local Storage was being used for the user data
  • Local Storage was migrated to a single Hub
  • All users are on said single Hub

Because the above setup does work effectively for a majority of purposes it creates the expectation for a large portion of users that the OneDrive & SharePoint services are reliable and consistent in their ability to provide access to files.

This comes with many caveats, and limitations - but mostly will result in the service for OneDrive being used where SharePoint would be a more ideal implementation for the end user.

It's not OneDrive, it's the configuration​

From everything I have been able to understand there is only one problem with OneDrive, and that is it's synonymous usage and the idea of it's interchangeability with SharePoint.

The problems are often caused by the configuration, as the method of syncing and the capacities of the method are provided by Microsoft with clear explanations on the intended use and the limits of those uses.

As a result of this, issues related to and caused by OneDrive are normally going to have some form of data detangling required in order to find the locations of the resources that are having an issue.

So when working with OneDrive it's important to run through the following mental checklist sometimes:

  • Is the Owner of the Resource known?
  • Are there any users with working access to the Resource?
  • Have there ever been users with working access to the Resource?
  • Is the Resource stored on OneDrive, or SharePoint?
  • Is the Resource accessible from the 365 Web Services?
  • Would the Resource be best accessed if migrated to a SharePoint Team?
  • Are there duplicated Resources causing confusion from the User Perspective?

There are a litany of different ways to solve and troubleshoot the discussion that begins with "OneDrive not working" which when understood in totality will best enable the mental framework to declutter, detangle and analyse the end users data appropriately.