Using Office 365 to Cleanup That Old File Server
There are plenty of articles out that covering Enterprise File Sharing and Sync (EFSS), Enterprise Document Management (EDM) and Enterprise Social Networks (ESN). More acronyms for everyone to remember, yay! There are also some pretty strong opinions for all three subjects, and honestly there is not one right opinion or answer. However I am myself a big proponent of cloud services where it is feasible, and combining all three solutions and other Line of Business (LOB) applications if possible.
As a consultant one of the biggest concerns that most clients have is security, and rightfully so. But anyone that has ever done an IT security plan knows that the first step is perimeter security. A properly certified data center (SSAE 16/SOC 1 is the current standard at the time of this writing) is always going to be more secure than your office building, except for large corporations that have their own datacenters. Because of the rigorous auditing standards it is unlikely that your data would be hacked. At least no worse than your office given that the data still lies behind a username and password that someone creates. Now not all cloud services are created equally, and there have been some pretty large, unforgivable security lapses the past few years, DropBox comes to mind on multiple occasions. But it seems that because of these mistakes everyone has upped their game and offers two factor authentication. Two factor authentication is another article but if you are worried about security and passwords you really have no excuse not to use this feature.
Okay now that we are beyond security, one thing that always annoys me as a system administrator for any client that I work with is that the shared mapped network drives are almost always a disaster. There is usually no organization to the folder structure. Occasionally there are a few department folders mixed in Jen, Sally, and Bob's private folders, project folder from 5 years ago (we think), and a HR folder that we aren't really sure who has access to it. Oh then there's the accounting drive that everyone in the department has complete access to, but everyone refers to it by a different drive letter. Sound familiar? Sadly it probably does.
This is where are three Enterprise cloud services come into play. But implementing them is no small feat and is not meant for everyone. Anyone working with CAD files for instance should not being syncing documents to the cloud for instance. Working in the with and EDM, and ESN takes a bit of getting use to and can be a culture shock to seasoned veterans in their positions. EFSS isn't as bad since you only need to train the person to save the file to a different location, and most people save to their desktop on the computer even though they are not supposed to.
But Nirvana can be achieved when all three services are combined. I am only going to use Office 365 as an example for our theoretical scenario shown above.
As a consultant one of the biggest concerns that most clients have is security, and rightfully so. But anyone that has ever done an IT security plan knows that the first step is perimeter security. A properly certified data center (SSAE 16/SOC 1 is the current standard at the time of this writing) is always going to be more secure than your office building, except for large corporations that have their own datacenters. Because of the rigorous auditing standards it is unlikely that your data would be hacked. At least no worse than your office given that the data still lies behind a username and password that someone creates. Now not all cloud services are created equally, and there have been some pretty large, unforgivable security lapses the past few years, DropBox comes to mind on multiple occasions. But it seems that because of these mistakes everyone has upped their game and offers two factor authentication. Two factor authentication is another article but if you are worried about security and passwords you really have no excuse not to use this feature.
Okay now that we are beyond security, one thing that always annoys me as a system administrator for any client that I work with is that the shared mapped network drives are almost always a disaster. There is usually no organization to the folder structure. Occasionally there are a few department folders mixed in Jen, Sally, and Bob's private folders, project folder from 5 years ago (we think), and a HR folder that we aren't really sure who has access to it. Oh then there's the accounting drive that everyone in the department has complete access to, but everyone refers to it by a different drive letter. Sound familiar? Sadly it probably does.
This is where are three Enterprise cloud services come into play. But implementing them is no small feat and is not meant for everyone. Anyone working with CAD files for instance should not being syncing documents to the cloud for instance. Working in the with and EDM, and ESN takes a bit of getting use to and can be a culture shock to seasoned veterans in their positions. EFSS isn't as bad since you only need to train the person to save the file to a different location, and most people save to their desktop on the computer even though they are not supposed to.
But Nirvana can be achieved when all three services are combined. I am only going to use Office 365 as an example for our theoretical scenario shown above.
- Using SharePoint (EDM), create department Team Sites that houses document and record libraries that effectively organizes the file structure. Since Team Sites use security for access control you inherently give file security those documents. If you need to grant access to a file or folder to someone outside of the team you can do that granularly on a file by file basis or on a library by library basis. Team sites also have many other uses than holding document libraries, including showing Dashboards for KPI's, Surveys, calendars, announcements, and many other options.
- Using Yammer (ESN) you are able to provide a conversation history and collaboration around a single document. In our example above we have forgotten files that no one knows if they are still relevant. Maybe there's a file that a new account manager can use rather than have to invent the wheel and allows that person to be more productive. Yammer has many other collaboration and social aspects that are supposed to allow companies to work together on projects, more effectively, across time zones, in different languages in a secured online environment,
- Now the beauty of OneDrive for Business (EFSS) is that you can sync any document library to any device and work on the file then save it to your local device which syncs it back to the cloud. Also you have the ability to have more than one person working on a file at once and being able to see the other person making changes real time. OneDrive for Business is not perfect by any means, with the biggest complaint being that there is no selective sync. You either sync the whole library or nothing.
I only talk about one scenario here with one solution as in the small business world this is a command setup. There are other options for companies that want to host their one files but still have the capabilities mentioned about through a Hybrid SharePoint solution or hosting a file server and using Microsoft Work Folders.