OneDrive and OneDrive For Business Under The Microscope – Grasp ’15

OneDrive and OneDrive For Business Under The Microscope – Grasp ’15

Microsoft loves to drive us up the wall from time to time, and there have been fewer better examples of this than the OneDrive cloud storage facilities OneDrive and OneDrive For Business. (Right off the bat there is an issue there is the question of why they named two facilities that could be easily confused by almost exactly the same name).

OneDrive is comparatively simple and efficient. It’s a free cloud storage facility that is associated with an Microsoft account whether this be when setting up a PC for the first time use, or through an outlook.com account. In theory its straight forward, you have a folder on your computer that synchronises and automatically uploads file content to a cloud storage facility you can access via your Microsoft online account.

Unfortunately Microsoft have consistently lacked such simplicity or any refinement for their business level cloud facilities from the early days with Groove, then SkyDrive Pro and now OneDrive For Business. “OneDrive For Business” will appear as such on your desktop however online it will still appear as a “SharePoint” site. Hardly common sense for those other than the administrators who’ve been there from the beginning who are familiar with Microsoft’s twitchy tendencies for naming conventions.

Huge problems exist in the current OneDrive For Business. Its most frustrating element is by far its integrated upload manager which has the simple task of synchronising and uploading all of your local OneDrive For Business folder content to your Sharepoint site. A task most services like GoogleDrive and Dropbox handle with minimal fuss. Microsoft’s take however flat out refuses to upload files with characters such as ampersand and is generally a bit temperamental.

With Office 365, Microsoft of course have a monopoly on cloud based workflow services being almost alone in this area. For the large part, it’s fantastic, especially with the integration of scaled down online versions of the Office programs to create, edit and distribute all online. However sharing this platform – OneDrive For Business has a long way to go before we can consider it anything other than a useful liability.

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