Recorded August 11, 2018
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Summary
In today’s On the SPOT News Brief, Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke talk Microsoft collaboration systems, specifically: SharePoint and OneDrive. To oversimplify their thoughts, inspired by the recently released Document Circle of Life in Office 365, the two ultimately agree that SharePoint is for co-authoring and publishing, while OneDrive is for individuals working on individual content — but there’s always more to it than any simplification can properly document.
Give us a listen and let us know what you think. And as always, if you have a topic you want us to discuss ping us on Twitter to let us know!
Featured image from Pixabay
Full Transcript
Jay Leask: – 00:00 – Oh, go ahead and hit record. I’ll line them up later.
Jay Leask: – 00:09 – Good afternoon. Today is August 10th. You probably haven’t heard from us in two and a half months. This is Jay Leask and you’re On the SPOT.
Craig Jahnke: – 00:19 – Hey, this is Craig Jahnke here with Jay for the Speed of Technology podcast. Yes, Jay, we have been remiss in our duties is to put out a podcast. That’s all I can say.
Jay Leask: – 00:28 – I like that in that time we’ve written a script for two or three different podcasts that are based on news articles at the time, so we can’t even use them at this point. But yeah, we tried. We tried.
Craig Jahnke: – 00:42 – We tried. It’s just that summer happened, and I don’t know about you, but my kids have been going everywhere, dance camps.
Jay Leask: – 00:51 – Everywhere, dance camp.
Craig Jahnke: – 00:52 – The play, the swimming pool.
Jay Leask: – 00:55 – That’s cool. Yeah, no, I wouldn’t even blame summer. I would just generally blame life. It’s trying to balance a job and multiple children and a third generation moving in and my wife going back to work a couple of weeks ago, and a podcast, cross country to be added. I would say it’s been difficult. So Craig, following our new methodology for podcasting like that, it’s a full featured methodology that will be documented one day. You know, when we’re rich enough to, or when were sought after enough to develop a book that shows how did we get here, right?
Craig Jahnke: – 01:35 – A lot of trial and error, I believe. Just what works, what doesn’t work and what do we have fun with the most?
Jay Leask: – 01:41 – So, speaking of having fun. Today, I came across an article. I work for AvePoint clearly, so a lot of the articles I come across are related to the Microsoft stack. And long story short, there’s an article on the website that talks about SharePoint versus OneDrive, and it was very relevant for me. I just had a conversation two days prior to this popping up on our website where the customer was excited because they have hundreds of terabytes of space to move to Office 365. That math was mostly calculated, or at least that math sounded like it was calculated, using their number of employees and the amount of OneDrive space they all get.
Craig Jahnke: – 02:24 – Yeah, that sounds like how you get, you get like a, what, a Gig per employee or more [crosstalk 00:02:29]-
Jay Leask: – 02:29 – I think it’s a terabyte per employee now.
Craig Jahnke: – 02:32 – Terabytes. They keep changing it and they keep giving people more and more data. It’s hard for me to keep up. Yeah, I get that and I just … I think we were talking before the show. I just completed a OneDrive migration where it was a divestiture, so we were splitting off about 150 employees to a new tenant. So yeah, they’re interesting to see. The interesting on that is, you know, everybody just assumes you can pick your data up and move it, but it takes a lot of time to move that much data. So I hope you have a few weeks planed to do that, if not months.
Jay Leask: – 03:06 – Well, and then you get into the conversation of how you decide whose data you’re moving. If you have people working in collaboration that are now in the two different organizations, where do you keep it? But that’s a different story altogether. Let’s talk about SharePoint versus OneDrive. What is your gut reaction to that statement?
Craig Jahnke: – 03:29 – So I think it’s interesting because you’ve seen different people put different articles out there and obviously the word for Microsoft is SharePoint is where you share your data with everybody and OneDrive is where you keep your personal stuff, right? So the things that you’re working on now you may want to share with one or two people, a rough draft or whatever, and then when you’re ready to publish it you copy and move it to SharePoint. But anymore I think that’s becoming … I don’t know how to say it, but SharePoint in it of itself is becoming many things, right?
Craig Jahnke: – 04:08 – There’s still a lot of companies out there using the traditional view of SharePoint where it’s team sites, as in we have a team site on SharePoint online, not Microsoft teams that’s associated to a group. They’re using it more as an intranet, so you’re using publishing pages and pages, sites. Now there’re other clients that are other people who are going into the new model and using communication sites for their publishing needs, or their policies and that’s where you kind of go when you get your news events and see what the CEO is saying and get all my HR documents and all that kind of stuff.
Craig Jahnke: – 04:46 – So there’s the intranet portal aspect to SharePoint. And then, as you know, we’ve talked several other times, there’s also this Microsoft teams with groups management behind it where people are working on individual projects that you’re spinning these up for short time things or things that are working on … that you’re not wanting to publish to the whole company, but just little departments or subgroups at the time.
Jay Leask: – 05:09 – Yeah. The other thing I find interesting, just on the other side of it, I’ve talked about kind of SharePoint and the multiple uses therein. OneDrive is the one that really interests me because the number of times I have heard a customer say we’re just going to move all our file shares to OneDrive. It’s an easy migration, and I hesitate because a lot of people haven’t grasped what OneDrive really is.
Jay Leask: – 05:32 – Yes, OneDrive is basically a document library within SharePoint. So the logical response is, of course I can move all my “document libraries” for my file shares to OneDrive. Except what a lot of people don’t realize is OneDrive is associated as a personal account. So, if you take a group library and move it up to a OneDrive account what you’re doing is you’re saying this group library in my file share, or my NAS or my T drive or whatever, is now content under Craig Jahnke. Well, the problem is if Craig Jahnke leaves the firm, what happens with this data that is associated with his account? A lot of companies, they remove that data, or they archive that data, or they lock it down.
Jay Leask: – 06:28 – The other problem is OneDrive is generally meant to be more of a: this is my stuff. I’m working on this stuff. I might share a thing here or there, but the permissions model, it’s expected to be broken. Inheritance. It’s expected to be messy, and when you try to manage a group out of a OneDrive, I mean, you’re going to have a nightmare.
Craig Jahnke: – 06:52 – Yeah. I’m going to be honest with you, Jay, I’m not seeing that so much in the scenarios that I’ve dealt with.
Jay Leask: – 06:57 – That’s good.
Craig Jahnke: – 06:58 – Because we recommend that would be going to a group.
Jay Leask: – 07:01 – Yes.
Craig Jahnke: – 07:02 – Or to SharePoint, but I-
Jay Leask: – 07:03 – Yes, and to be clear I’m not saying people are doing it. I’m saying that customers that we are talking to are thinking of it that way and we’re having to steer them away from that because that’s really not how it’s meant to be used.
Craig Jahnke: – 07:17 – No. So what I am seeing very similar is most companies when they set up an employee will set a shared file up, like, an H drive, and all your personal stuff gets saved to the H drive. Then they want to move those to OneDrive, and I run scans on a few companies now and it consistently comes back with just a load of stuff. You know, we’re talking … I have one company that has a pretty good movie collection in .MP4s and .FLVs. I mean, we’re talking Harry Potter movies were talking UP, we’re talking the Lord of the rings, were talking all those kinds of things. Things that take … We’re also seeing, when you hit an IT department, we’re seeing things like visual studio. Eclipse, if you’re a Java developer. Intelligent business analytics type of software that saving files and log files into these personal folders. Now, best practice would be, hey, let’s not move this stuff or let’s have these people go through and sort this data out.
Craig Jahnke: – 08:24 – The other one I have seen, managers will drag their employees who’ve left personal folders into their personal folders. Now you’re talking deeply, deeply nested thousands of, thousands of folders. They take forever to migrate. I had one employee, 700 gigabytes worth of data, took four and a half days for her just to migrate.
Craig Jahnke: – 08:47 – So we’re talking a lot of things, and if you tell them, “Well you should go through it,” well we’ll send an email out, but I can guarantee only about 10%-20% of people are going to, you know, maybe will clean it up. So let’s just move everything and get it there.
Jay Leask: – 08:59 – Yeah, you’re absolutely right that the nested folders and the … I didn’t even think about it, but the … I’m in sales, so whenever an account manager leaves the organization all of their email, all of their … they don’t even turn their email off. They give that inbox to the manager or the person that’s taking over their accounts. The same thing with the files. They just give them access to those files. In the older model especially, yeah, you just copied and pasted. You took all of their files, you copied them into yours. If you’ve got a sales manager of a big department, you got dozens of peoples of stuff in there and I absolutely agree the movie collections and the MP3 collections, all that stuff. You don’t want to be migrating that. That’s a disaster and a half.
Craig Jahnke: – 09:51 – Well the interesting thing is the big files aren’t the things that moves. The ones that take the time is the small files, because it’s still got to go through with the writing and moving the metadata and knows things about it. I have a couple employees who had their phones, they charged their phones on their computer but they were iPhones and they automatically just popped up that message, “Hey, do you want to sync with the computer?” So, it backed up their iTunes to the phones and now you’ve got all that artwork and all that other crap. You’re talking, again, thousands upon thousands of folders over an organization that just has little tiny gif files and little tiny MP3 files and little tiny artwork photos and whatever.
Craig Jahnke: – 10:36 – And it’s not that, that’s a lot of data because it’s not, it’s just that it takes forever for it to migrate, because we got to find it, we’ve got to move it, and we got to write it to the new destination. And it’s just horrible. I think, you know, it goes back to conversations we’ve had in the past. People don’t realize that that slows up the process and they really, really underestimate how long it will take to migrate that data by at least a third. Usually every estimate I get on how long it will take to migrate something. I can take it in times three and be closer.
Jay Leask: – 11:10 – All right, well it looks like we need to have another conversation about migration planning.
Craig Jahnke: – 11:14 – Yeah. And I’m using, you know, it’s time … AvePoint does it, I talked to … now I’m enrolled with a consulting company and I’ve talked to Sharegate who was competitor to AvePoint, SkySync and a couple other vendors, Metalogix you’ve heard. It’s the same story with any of them. Nobody’s got that one solution that can fix all these problems. These are just, you know, these are planning problems that you have to think about before the tool. The tool doesn’t matter. A lot of it goes to the planning on how you’re going to do a migration.
Jay Leask: – 11:47 – Remind me next episode that I bring up all of your competitors on the podcast and say it doesn’t matter what consultant you use. They’re all the same for. Remind me to do that for you.
Craig Jahnke: – 11:59 – All right, you can edit that one out.
Jay Leask: – 12:02 – No, I might leave it. That’s okay.
Craig Jahnke: – 12:03 – No. AvePoint, like I said, AvePoint’s got a great tool and you have to evaluate the tool based on your need. I am doing small customers right now, so like I said, I’ve just been talking. Everybody’s main complaint is Microsoft throttles people. So there’s a big. They can’t get around that. Right? To make it better.
Jay Leask: – 12:26 – We could do a whole episode on just how to get around the Microsoft throttling. Well, how to work around the Microsoft throttling, not to get around it. That’s a different conversation altogether. But, bringing us back. So let’s summarize, because boy, did we go off on a tangent.
Jay Leask: – 12:44 – Let’s summarize. SharePoint versus OneDrive. It sounds like we’re both in complete agreement here. OneDrive is your personal business data. Now, clearly people are going to put stuff out there that isn’t business data, but that’s step one, OneDrive left end of the spectrum where you do your personal business that you aren’t generally sharing with other people.
Craig Jahnke: – 13:09 – I agree. Then SharePoint is where you put the stuff you want to share with everybody and depending on how you want to share that or what that data is, I think there’s myriad, there’s at least four or five different options for how you do that in SharePoint. Right? So we talked about the communication side, the publishing sites for the older versions, the team sites that used to exist if you’re using the older model of going through the SharePoint admin center, although they’re changing that. Then now you have the new team sites with a group, you know, it was attached to Microsoft group.
Jay Leask: – 13:43 – And we’ve been talking about SharePoint versus OneDrive, but really this is … the conversation we’re having is just focused on a particular set of tools. This is a real conversation every organization is having no matter what stack of tools there on top of. Where do my individuals do their individual work? Where to my teams do their teamwork? Where do I publish information that might individuals need access to?
Craig Jahnke: – 14:10 – Yes. And you want to make it more fun because then they follow up and how do I get everybody to use it?
Jay Leask: – 14:15 – Oh, okay. We’re not getting into adoption today. We can talk about adoption another time. I think on that note, let’s call it a day.
Jay Leask: – 14:22 – Craig Jahnke, it’s been a pleasure talking with you.
Craig Jahnke: – 14:24 – Nice talking to you, Jay. Enjoy your week and I got nothing.
Jay Leask: – 14:32 – And goodbye.
Craig Jahnke: – 14:33 – And goodbye.
Jay Leask: – 14:43 – This episode brought to you by Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke, two guys who like to talk technology and live in a connected world. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers only, and in no way do they represent the opinions of their employers, their customers, or their wives. This has been an On the SPOT podcast production.
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