Real World Computing

Why would you do this? Sometimes you need to exchange files with external parties who for some reason are unable to email them. This can happen if the files are too large or if they trip virus scanners. It's quite common for people to resort to third-party tools such as DropBox but these can be insecure.  There is an easier way.  In this post, I'll walk through a way to temporarily share a folder with an external party so that they can submit a file to you . How To 1. Open your Personal OneDrive on the web (there's a link at www.office.com ) 2. Use the Menu to create a New Folder, click New then Folder 3. Give the folder a sensible name  and click  Create . If you're planning on sharing lots of folders with different people, you might want to nest the folder a few levels down, perhaps below a folder called Shared . That way you'll be able to reduce clutter in the top levels of your OneDrive. 4. Right-Mouse click on your newly created folder a...

I do a lot of reading on the Microsoft tech boards and I find the information that Microsoft provides around OneDrive to be both confusing and lacking in detail. I wrote this post as a means of clearing up some of the confusion.   So, here's my interpretation and opinions on what OneDrive and File Libraries in SharePoint (via a proper Office 365 E3 or E5 subscription) can offer; The Sync Client isn't all that Important SharePoint file libraries can replace all of your networked drive needs and these facilities have come a long way in the last few years. In fact, for the most part, SharePoint has finally eclipsed the need for the OneDrive Sync client.  There's a few minor exceptions to this rule. You still can't easily "link" files, so if you have an excel file which updates its data from other excel files, it a real pain to add and install those connections -- and it's much easier if you have a local synced connection. Saving files in Offi...

Attaching files from SharePoint has gotten a little easier of late. I'm not quite sure when the changes happened but they're very welcome.   The new functionality is available in the outlook client and outlook web access. It's available for most SharePoint groups right now, with SharePoint groups created via Yammer following at the end of May 2018. Attachments in the Outlook Client Use the following steps to attach a file via the Outlook client; Create a new Email On the Message Tab, click Attach, Below the list of recent documents, click Browse Web Locations When this expands to show a list, choose Group Files You should see your SharePoint libraries appear in a list. There's a few reasons why you might not see all of your libraries.  If this is the first time that you're using this feature, or if you're using a new installation of Outlook, it may take a while (up to 20 minutes) to fully populate the list of sites. You don't have to w...

Once you're used to the new way of working, OneDrive and SharePoint are great file storage systems. The biggest problem is getting your files into them. Sure, it's usually just a case of drag and drop but the real problems are related to some tighter controls on the file names. The worst offenders are the ampersand and the hashtag. In fact, it seems to be really common for people to name their files with a hashtag in financial circles. For example: "Invoice No #675853.pdf" OneDrive and SharePoint will "spit the dummy" if you try to upload a file that breaks these rules. Interface Problems What's worse is that while the upload tools will happily report all of the errors, it doesn't give you a chance to correct them and it doesn't tell you exactly where in the path the offending file is. What's more, you can't copy the log of errors to the clipboard and I haven't seen any signs of any other forms of logging - not that I...

Over the past few months, I've been looking at a whole range of options to do with file storage on the basis that Microsoft's OneDrive simply doesn't do what we need. The whole time of course, I've been unable to shake the feeling that Microsoft should be offering something that already covers this space. After all, file sharing is one of the major "tentpoles" in most Windows networks.  As it turns out, SharePoint is the answer to this - and it works well if it's playing nicely with OneDrive.  My initial investigation of SharePoint was flawed for a number of reasons. Firstly, it appears that I was looking at an "old version".  The "new" version has really only started to come out over the last few months but it's light years ahead of its predecessor. The second reason that SharePoint was overlooked was because I really didn't have a great understanding of how (or why) it works. I was trying to compare it to IBM Domino a...

Microsoft OneDrive is great! It's easy to use too and has some really great integration into Office 2016 - which means that when you go to save or open files, instead of displaying a file dialog, it renders the folder names right into the panel. Sadly the sharepoint integration in Office 2016 is still dialog-based.  On the surface, it looks like a great files storage solution but as it turns out, just like Tolkien's OneRing, beneath that shiny surface, OneDrive is mostly evil.  At work, we're still using an old file server which allows people in the company to save files into public, personal or restricted access areas. It's a great browsable structure with the main drawbacks being that it's on a local file server (which means ageing infrastructure and semi-manual backup procedures) and security because it needs a VPN to get to our internal systems. Many of our users still find a VPN too complex to set up and it's hard to get a VPN that runs on all flavo...