Stop Using OneDrive the Wrong Way

Take a trip with me. It’s 2015. Microsoft’s, SharePoint 2013 is all the buzz. (Well, in the SharePoint Community).

Tons of SharePoint Admins are excited.  SharePoint 2010 is in its golden years. Rumors of social integrations, like the “Newsfeed,” have drummed up interest.  

In 2015 you couldn’t spend 10 minutes on LinkedIn without a recruiter contacting you about a “company” needing a SharePoint Administrator to help get them to SharePoint 2013. 

You join that “company” and your journey starts. The days and hours installing SharePoint 2013 begin. Enterprise rituals like building a dev environment, test environment, and production environment begin. Consultants are involved. Plans unfold for roll out. Roll out kicks off. Roll out continues, and continues. 

It’s now 2016 in my story. Still doing that same migration, Exchange Online becomes something people start to notice of. With Exchange Online licensing, there is this product called, “OneDrive for Business.” (They should teach Microsoft Licensing classes in college, by the way). There is the “OneDrive” button in the SharePoint 2013 banner. “Oh wow, we can point that to the cloud,” you think to yourself. The storage it saves, what could possibility go wrong? 

It’s now 2017. OneDrive for Business introduces co-authoring. Mired in a pesky migration that you don’t really notice or care about, you are too busy trying to show people how to check-in and check out documents, more than likely. 

2018, OneDrive keeps advancing. You’re still supporting SharePoint 2013. 

Later in 2018 “What is this thing called Microsoft Teams?” 

By 2019 OneDrive For Business has subconsciously taken over as the default “collaboration” place for employees and you are left wondering what the Hell just happened. 

In wasn’t my intention to lead into my first LinkedIn article with an 8 paragraph synopsis, but here we are, and I hope you are still with me. Recently, I posted on LinkedIn saying that I was going to start an Office 365 blog, and my first post would be titled “Stop Using OneDrive for Business the Wrong Way.” Well, I’m doing the next best thing and writing an article about it. Why? Because, it bothers me. It bothers me that messaging is wrong, and that the effects of that messaging can cost people and companies productivity, and more importantly money. 

Full disclosure, I don’t hate OneDrive for Business. In fact, I love it. It is a great place for MY FILES. I can get to my files whenever I want to. I can bring my files to my Teams and my SharePoint site whenever I want. Here is the fundamental problem that I have, OneDrive for Business is not a collaboration tool. Does it have collaboration features? Yes. Is it easy to use? Yes. However, it is not a place where people should be sharing out files with 10, 20, 30 people. 

I understand why Suzy from Sales and George from Marketing think that OneDrive is for Team files, they are too busy doing their jobs to care what the correct messaging is.

Case in point, I was recently watching a LinkedIn learning on PowerApps, I was confused when the Author was demoing PowerApps integration, and sourcing the files in his OneDrive. So I posted this:

And I got this response, from Phil Gold, a LinkedIn learning Trainer:

Phil is an accomplished Trainer. His videos are solid. But think about this for a second, let’s say you source data in your OneDrive for a PowerApp. Let’s pretend that your PowerApp takes off and people start using it. Your boss loves it, your bosses boss loves it and you become a star in your company. Then, for whatever reason, you decide to leave. Guess what happens? The PowerApp that Joey in Legal is using - doesn’t work anymore. Why, you ask? Your OneDrive, the files in it, all go bye bye when you leave and your account is shut down. You may not care, but I bet those bosses will. 

This all sounds very worst case. I blame my attitude on this because I grew up in IT working at Law Firms. As a lawyer recently told me, they teach in law school something called the Parade of Horribles. This has rubbed off on me, and there is nothing that I can do about it. 

Back to the point, I want to focus on what Phil said.

OneDrive for Business is simpler than putting the file into a SharePoint Library

There it is. As someone that has spent countless hours and years trying to teach people SharePoint, Phil Gold is right. OneDrive is simpler. Not paying my taxes is a simpler way to keep more money but I don't do that because it's not the right way, and I don't want the IRS coming after me. There are a lot of things that are simpler than doing the right thing, but that doesn’t mean we should proliferate it. 

So what is the point of the long, rambling article? I think it is this: We need to start messaging OneDrive for Business the right way, and now we can.

I’ve recently found myself training users on how to use Microsoft Teams. My colleagues and I have a whole script that we follow. In that script, we have a very leading and intentional portion where we try to begin to re-message OneDrive. Some of my colleagues and I have recently attended SharePoint Fest in Chicago, and a really smart consultant, Susan Hanley, nailed the message. OneDrive is "Me", Teams/SharePoint is "We."

I love this message, and so far, this has resonated with the folks that we have trained. In fact, almost every time we bring this up, the next question we get is, “Ok, so then how do we move the files from OneDrive to Teams?” Of course, we demo how you can do that right from the web interface – Thanks Microsoft! 

Another colleague of mine, who I respect dearly, brought up a great point about this whole messaging/usability issue. He said, “We aren’t going to be able to undo the usage of OneDrive.” I sighed, but he followed up with, “But we can make the other tools just as easy and accessible.” 

Maybe that will be article number 2 for me.