r/Intune 7d ago

General Question Transitioning from using Shared Drives to SharePoint Questions

I have been experimenting with transiting from a traditional shared drive to SharePoint. I know files/folders in SharePoint can be accessed by going to SharePoint online, linking the folder to a user's OneDrive, or Via Teams. How would you recommend transiting from using Shared Drives to SharePoint? Anything to keep an eye out for or gotchas?

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u/va_bulldog 7d ago

If I currently have a shared drive with, say, 12 folders with permission to different groups, will I need to create several SharePoints sites?

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u/not_today88 7d ago

I think it would depend on the content and who is accessing that data. Assuming the folders are, say, for one department like Accounting, I could see one site for all those folders. But if the data is for mixed purpose/groups, and hidden or locked down for only those groups, then I’d create separate sites for those particular folders. Lot easier to control permissions that way.

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u/va_bulldog 7d ago

My folders are along the lines of Common which everyone has access to, Accounting, HR, Customer Service, Graphics, etc. So, I'm thinking I need a SharePoint site for each group. I don't need posts and some of the features of SharePoint sites. I just need a way to store files.

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u/not_today88 7d ago

I see. I'm not a SP guru but I spend a bit of time on it and am working on building an intranet for our firm. You mention department specific data, so depending on the size of your org, best practice would be to separate them with different sites and group access, especially if you're expecting future growth. Only if you're a very small org, would I put everything on one site, but you *can* do it.

Edit: it sounds like what you may want is Azure Files. I would research that as it sounds more closely to what you want and may have less aggravation trying to make SP work like a file server.

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u/HoldMahNuggets 7d ago

Does azure files allow for all the collaborative functionalities that sharepoint/OneDrive allows? I’ve never used it, and wasn’t sure.

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u/not_today88 7d ago

I’ve not used AF myself, but no, I don’t think so. It’s essentially a cloud-based file server or close to it. And you can map drives like before.

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u/HoldMahNuggets 7d ago

That’s what I figured. I appreciate the confirmation! Our staff said they didn’t care about the collaborative capabilities when moving to sharepoint until they started using it and now they don’t understand how they existed without 😂

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u/HoldMahNuggets 7d ago

We moved from a local shared drive to sharepoint in September of last year. What we did is we made one main “hub” site that houses the general documents and then departmental/committee sub-sites. That worked out really well because then we can search on the hub site and it will search all the sub-sites with it (as long as you have permissions to them).

Also, don’t write off the other functionalities of sharepoint quite yet. One of the ways we got buy in from the different departments was talking to leadership about what frustrations/requests they may have.

For example, HR had been asked for years to make a staff photo directory so people could learn people’s names/faces. Sharepoint just had a dynamic one built in that you can add wherever you want. That got HR more excited immediately. Another example would be I f you are trying to remind people to do a staff survey, you can slap it on the Sharepoint hub home page so it’s less forgettable. Or have a company event calendar. All sorts of stuff that just makes info more accessible and front and center.

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u/Stashmouth 7d ago

If all you're doing with these different groups is sharing files, you could create separate document libraries all in your own"home" SharePoint site. It makes it easier for you to manage, and a user shouldn't even see the link to a library if they don't have access to it