Where to put data in Office 365?

Office 365 has lots of choice when it comes to storing corporate information and that confuses many people. The first place to start to avoid confusion is to understand exactly where information can be placed inside Office 365 and whether that information is available to all users or just an individual by default.

Hopefully the above diagram makes things a little bit easier to understand and here’s a breakdown of what it’s all about

The large box that contains everything is Office 365.

The first box in the top left is Exchange Online. This can contain a user’s personal mailbox (which is private), shared mailboxes (which are public) and public folders (which are public). Into the Exchange box you normally store emails shared between the three smaller boxes within.

The second box on the top row in the middle is SharePoint. This contains OneDrive for Business (which is private), Team Sites (which is public) and Video (which is public). Into the SharePoint box you normally store files shared between the three smaller boxes within.

The box in the top right of the first row is Yammer into which goes conversations (or discussions) that are public.

The box on the left in the bottom row is Office 365 Groups which are composed of a public shared mailbox and a public shared OneDrive for Business. Thus, any information that goes into the Office 365 Groups box will be public. Into the Groups box you normally store files and emails that should to be stored together because they relate to a single topic.

The box on the right in the bottom row is Office 365 Planner which is comprised of public Groups and public Tasks. Thus, any information that goes into Planner will be public. Into Planner you normally store files, emails and tasks that need to be stored together (i.e projects) because they relate to a single topic.

As you can see by the colour scheme, green is shared information amongst the business while red is private information unique to an individual user.

Of course you don’t need to use every storage location in Office 365 that is available to you immediately and your usage locations may also change over time. Best practice is to start with information in Exchange, then expand into Office 365 Groups, then Planner, then SharePoint and finally Yammer. The important thing to remember is that Office 365 gives you lots of choice of where to save your information, it is up to you to work out what makes the most sense for your business.

Hopefully, that makes a little easier to understand when it comes to determining where to put different types of information. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or contacting me directly (director@ciaops.com).

How to fix the inability to sync Team Sites with Next Gen sync client

The unfortunate thing is not that Microsoft recently update Team Sites to 1TB of storage but it hasn’t as yet brought the ability to sync Team Sites to the Next Gen sync client.

You can find all the details on the Next Gen Sync client here:

Meet the OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client

Getting Started wit the OneDrive for Business Generation Sync Client in Windows

Deploying the OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client in an enterprise environment

This inability to sync Team Sites is causing a lot of frustration in the field and the inability to sync Team Sites has recently been announced in the roadmap map, but for many it can’t come soon enough.

If you want to do something more than simply shake with rage about this and other issues you are experiencing with the sync client I suggest you visit the OneDrive User Voice:

https://onedrive.uservoice.com/

and vote up the items you want given priority. Also don’t be shy about leaving a comment as to the impact this is having for your business.

If you want the new sync client to support Team Sites then throw as much of your votes here:

https://onedrive.uservoice.com/forums/262982-onedrive/suggestions/10026033-new-sync-client-must-support-team-sites

Once you voted, pass the link onto others and get them to vote.

This is the most effective method of effecting change with the Next Gen sync client because just being frustrated doesn’t. You need to take action to effect change.

So if you want to fix the Next Gen Sync client, take action and encourage others to do the same. Vote,comment and then share this post.

Retaining your OneDrive bonuses

Recently I detailed how Microsoft had decided to scale back the amount of space it was providing for its OneDrive consumer products (NOT OneDrive for Business as many have incorrectly stated). My previous post on the topic is here:

OneDrive consumer space gets scaled back

Now if you are like me, over time you have accumulated a number of free bonuses with OneDrive consumer that have boosted your available space beyond the standard limits. If you are in that situation then I suggest yuou visit:

https://preview.onedrive.com/bonus

This will take you to the above page where you can click the button Keep your free storage to ensure you don’t lose any of the bonuses you have accumulated.

I’d suggest you do it sooner rather than later as well!

How to present Office 365

I’m working on a new course for my online training academy that will give people a framework for successfully presenting Office 365 to prospects, clients and colleagues.

Having presented this material in face to face classroom sessions I was really looking to incorporate the “whiteboard” experience on screen. What I therefore decided to try was using the Windows 10 OneNote app on my Surface 3 along with the Surface pen to see how well it would work while obviusly recording the whole thing.

My trial attempt is shown above and I think it worked pretty well. Obviously, there will need to be some polishing done before I release the final version of the course material, which will also contain more tutorials on how to present each individual service such as Delve.

Have a look and let me know what you think at the rough draft of on screen “whiteboarding”. Also, if you have played with OneNote and a pen then I suggest you do as OneNote is a great hand notetaking tool as hopefully the video illustrates. Of course if you want to find out when the course on Presenting Office 365 becomes available then stay tuned here or sign up for free at my online academy:

www.ciaopsacademy.com

Moving a OneNote notebook to Office 365

In the last blog post I covered how to move a OneNote notebook to OneDrive consumer. Just to balance things up I’ve recorded the above video tutorial that show you how to move a OneNote notebook from SharePoint 2010 to OneDrive for Business on Office 365.

Basically the process is the same but the video show you how quick the move process actually is.

Moving OneNote notebooks to OneDrive

The problem is that SharePoint 2010 no longer has mainstream support. Thus, it is therefore time to move everything off that platform including OneNote notebooks. Now you could easily move it to Office 365 but what if you wanted to move your OneNote notebooks to the consumer onedrive.com instead? Here’s how you can do that.

In my case, I have a number of ‘nice to have’ notebooks hanging around on an old hosted SharePoint 2010 site. They are currently stored in their own Document Library called OneNote. One such notebook called SharePoint Bootcamp and when you drill into its current location you see the above structure.

Because the SharePoint 2010 hosting service I was using didn’t include Office Online it meant that they only way I could see the contents of my notebook was to open and sync it with OneNote on the desktop as you see above.

All versions of SharePoint provide a great repository for OneNote files and allow them to be opened by multiple people and multiple devices and have them all in sync. Truly brilliant and if I hadn’t chosen to move away from SharePoint 2010 they could happily stay in place, working as they always did.

Now, the recommended process to move a notebook is laid out here:

Move a OneNote notebook that you’ve shared with others

It basically suggests you create a new notebook in the destination and copy the original sections over. That was just too much work for me so my approach was simply to change the source location of the notebook and have it sync to there.

Now the challenge of moving a notebook to OneDrive consumer is that you need to go via an indirect method as you can’t simply use OneNote to complete the move.

The first step in my process was to login to my consumer OneDrive and create a new OneNote folder just to keep things tidy.

Next, I went in and created a new blank OneNote notebook here from the New menu at the top of the page as shown above.

After you have given your new notebook a name it will open in a browser like that shown above. Select the option in the middle at the top of the page, Open in OneNote.

This will then open the notebook using OneNote on the desktop. Right mouse click on the name of the notebook in the top left and from the menu that appears select Properties as shown above.

You should see the current location as being your OneDrive consumer. Select the Change Location button on the right.

This should open a Windows File Explorer dialog as shown above. If you select the path box at the top of the page you should see the full path. Copy the full path to the clipboard and close the dialog as you are not going to change the location of this temporary notebook.

Locate the notebook you wish to move in the desktop version of OneNote. Right mouse click on the name and select Properties from the menu that appears as before.

As you can see this notebook is located in hosted version of SharePoint. Select the Change Location button as before.

Once again, the Windows File Explorer will launch. Paste the file location you copied previously at the top of the page. Make sure you remove the trailing temporary notebook name and only leave the folder structure i.e. from

https://d.docs.live.net/308d6e43c203741/OneNote/test

https://d.docs.live.net/308d6e43c203741/OneNote/

and press Enter.

Windows File Explorer should update the location as shown above. You should now see a folder for the temporary notebook you created. Simply press Enter to save the original notebook into this new location.

Once the notebook has moved and synced to the new location, if you look in OneDrive consumer you should see two notebooks as shown above. The original temporary one (which you can now delete) and the second one you relocated from the original location (here SharePoint Bootcamp).

The desktop version of OneNote will now sync the notebook to this new location in OneDrive consumer. This means you can return to the original SharePoint 2010 location and delete the source files.

The big benefits for me of moving notebooks into OneDrive consumer is that they are simple to sync on every device and that I can access them also directly from a web browser which I couldn’t before.

So in summary, you can simply move a OneNote notebook by changing its location via the notebook properties. Obtaining the location for OneDrive consumer can be a little tricky but as I have shown here it isn’t too difficult to find.

OneDrive for Business expiration of share links now available

You should find, if not already then soon, that you can now set an expiry time on something you share from your OneDrive for Business as shown above.

This gives you much greater control over your files by being able to automatically revoke access to information after a certain number of days.

This ability is not yet available in SharePoint Team Sites but I would expect to appear there soon as well.

For more information on sharing files from your OneDrive for Business see:

Share documents or folders in Office 365

OneDrive consumer space gets scaled back

In a world where we are use to seeing more it is surprising to discover that Microsoft is limiting the amount of space available in OneDrive consumer. That is until you read this blog post they recently posted:

https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/

In essence what it says is that a small number of people have been ‘exploiting’ the amount of storage available in OneDrive consumer to use it for things that it wasn’t really designed for such as storing images of hard disks, entire movie collections and so on.

To prevent this and ensure OneDrive is used as a collaboration tool rather than just a free dumping ground for data Microsoft will start to limit the amount of space available to users of the service. If you want to know how that may affect you I suggest you read the above blog post from Microsoft.

The following quote from the blog post sums it up well and reinforces what I say about all versions of OneDrive:

“OneDrive has always been designed to be more than basic file storage and backup. These changes are needed to ensure that we can continue to deliver a collaborative, connected, and intelligent service. They will allow us to continue to innovate and make OneDrive the best option for people who want to be productive and do more.”

I see so many people trying to shoehorn their whole one premises file server into OneDrive for Business. It is not designed for that and you should not be merely copying all your data to a location that was designed for individuals not teams. You should also not be dumping all your data (much of it unused generally) into a single document library. SharePoint Online (which includes OneDrive for Business) is designed primarily for collaboration. If all you want is web storage then SharePoint Online is probably not the best solution.

I wrote the following article a while back to highlight the appropriate way to consider migrations to SharePoint Online:

The Classic SharePoint Online Migration Mistake

The important thing to remember here is that this recent control of the space available to OneDrive refers to the consumer version NOT OneDrive for Business (for now). However importantly, the takeaway for Office 365 users here is that OneDrive for Business is designed for individual users and is not designed as a general data dumping ground for data.

Go forth and collaborate.