Comment by liamwire
3 hours ago
Come on, a problem nobody really had? I wholeheartedly disagree. Data loss and the orthogonal problem of lacking free space on computers is/was a massive problem at enterprise scale and OneDrive, for all its many shortcomings, is well and truly into good-enough territory to cover the 80% case. I'd go so far as to argue that the scenario you've described is by far the less frequent one. And if it frustrates you, you're afforded the ability to designate files and entire folders to be kept downloaded at all times anyway.
Data loss and storage is always a challenge, that's why companies will have network drives, network storage that's not strongly coupled with your account acess. OneDrive doesn't solve the problem in a clean way. It adds an extra layer of brittleness.
Network storage does not handle the online/offline switching as transparently as OneDrive (or other cloud storage).
For large enterprises that old architecture you refer to means long lead times on network and storage outage notifications, and huge fallout if an outage window is blown.
And if the building network goes down, or if your storage servers are located off site because you’re too big for one building and the commercial internet goes down, etc etc
But it doesn’t have to be OneDrive. There are many other options. I run ownCloud 10 for my personal files. If I were a small to medium business, I would look hard at OCIS.
Network drives mean no local retention and no real good answer for Windows+Mac+Android+iOS clients to remotely access the files. It also doesn't solve sharing those files externally with granular permissions.
All of these kinds things need protection against data loss and centralized control+management, not just the user folder alone.
Sure. And you wouldn't need phishing protections if users had brains. But then you run into real users so hand-holding solutions start to make sense.
And as someone who worked and still works in IT support, users will not save to network drives, their machine will crash and files will be lost.
YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.
OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
Seems to me that if you want to experience data loss, Sharepoint is going to cover your needs just fine.
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