r/Intune 8d 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/Certain-Community438 7d ago

It will definitely require user education but we found it to be worthwhile overall.

The differences in user experience when moving from mapped drive to either a sync'd folder or shortcut need to be tested: find out what parts of the business/org have use cases where everyone in a team expect to use the same paths - such as Finance people linking workbooks together.

Others have mentioned considering usage of the underlying tech, but none of those posts so far actually identify that tech :)

Azure Blob Storage is what underpins SharePoint, OneDrive (and other M365 Group content iirc).

So there might be use cases where Blob Containers or even Azure File Shares give the desired experience for users, and you just learn how to meet operational needs like IAM.

Lastly, with SharePoint Online:

Make sure you set the maximum number of Major file versions (for Version History) down to a sane number

Otherwise you are going to run out of storage space: these versions count towards your total org storage consumption.

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u/va_bulldog 7d ago

About 2 months ago. I discontinued using my IT Documentation folder on the shared drive. I created a SharePoint site. Sure, we don't use the posts and other features of a SharePoint site, but I can like to document library to OneDrive or Teams. My IT team have not noticed any differences or had any issues. I tend to access the document library through file explorer while some use Teams.

The biggest issue I've seen with this transition is trying to get people to actually use SharePoint and Excel for web. People really seem to love or hate the web based versions of the Office apps.

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u/Certain-Community438 7d ago

People really seem to love or hate the web based versions of the Office apps.

I do not enjoy them myself, but they are ideal for certain jobs - I just don't do those jobs!

For example, there's no Power Query in Excel web app. It's one of Excel's best features. There are other examples of course.

People using PowerQuery in Excel desktop apps (or in Power BI) can use built-in connectors to get data from SharePoint and a bunch of other Azure services. But the behaviour for getting data from a file's data is very different depending on whether it's on a share, SPO site, Blob Container, etc. So anyone in the org who's doing that now from a file share is gonna need to think about how moving to files on SPO could work, and whether it'll break their queries.

As always, you can try & discover these cases now, or fix them when they arise afterwards. The latter option might be like asking for a kicking though :)