One of my clients has the need to have a copy of there SPO files on a on premise File server, Why you ask?
Let me explain the background.
My client was working for a company is AUS, They then moved back to the UK where he set up a franchise of the same business. (so we have a UK presents and a AUS presents).
The AUS Office then decided to start using Office 365 and had a external developer create them a bespoke SPO app that they use for managing projects. My client (before i was looking after them) was then added to this AUS tenant. All is well and good so far.
I then started to look after them with all the usual desktop support stuff. Once i did i very quickly found that One Drive for Business was having major issues synchronizing the files down from SPO. 100s of errors stating that file paths are too long(easy fix), files have been edited both sides(even though everyone says nothings been touched) and cannot be uploaded or just plain old error has occurred. This resulted in many, many corruptions of the local One Drive cache, things not actually being uploaded to SPO and files just going missing.
As you can imagine my client was starting to get very frustrated at this point and so am i!
So i start to think of ways we can stop using the OneDrive client all together and just allow them to collaborate in the "traditional" way of using UNC paths and maybe mapped drives. Iv found a few ways to maps drives directly to the SPO tenant, but these are so, so slow they are totally unworkable (i found there is a issue that a hotfix resolves, i have installed but made no difference).
So this is where the idea of having a local file server with all the documents in, they work with them on the local server and then a "process" copies these files over in the background to the SPO tenant.
So, a Few questions:
- Am i totally barking up the wrong tree here?
- Is it normal for mapped drives to SPO to be so slow? (maybe the tenant is in AUS and this is the reason? I'm unsure how to find how where its all residing, Google shows a few things but non have been conclusive)
- Is there a method of Synchronizing between SPO and a on premise server? (Again i have looked at Hybrid-Sharepoint implementations but these all look massively overkill)
Thanks in advance
Matt