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Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

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Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#51

Post by JoshTriplett »

kenjackson wrote: post #50
kabdib wrote: post #48

SharePoint has always been a piece of garbage. Unfortunately it's a money making piece of garbage, so there you go. Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole separa…

When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there, Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.

Please feel free to teach that to all of the people forced to use SharePoint, who mostly don't know about that. And SharePoint's obtuse interface does not make that particularly easy to discover.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#52

Post by kenjackson »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #51
kenjackson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there, Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.

Please feel free to teach that to all of the people forced to use SharePoint, who mostly don't know about that. And SharePoint's obtuse interface does not make that particularly easy to discover.

If it's a tool used for your job I'd suggest they spent 30 minutes to learn it. Would you allow a dev to just start using Git with no training at your company? Would you cut the dev any slack if he complained about Git without bothering to learn how to use it first?

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#53

Post by marshray »

kabdib wrote: post #48

SharePoint has always been a piece of garbage. Unfortunately it's a money making piece of garbage, so there you go. Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole separa…

To an experienced software developer, any document management system is going to feel like a poor excuse for a source code control system. But many businesses live and breathe by their documents and workflows the way development teams do their source code.

It sounds like most of your complaints are about the way the processes were managed rather than SharePoint itself.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#54

Post by JoshTriplett »

kenjackson wrote: post #52
JoshTriplett wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please feel free to teach that to all of the people forced to use SharePoint, who mostly don't know about that. And SharePoint's obtuse interface does not make that particularly easy to discover.

If it's a tool used for your job I'd suggest they spent 30 minutes to learn it. Would you allow a dev to just start using Git with no training at your company? Would you cut the dev any slack if he complained about Git without bothering to learn how to use it first?

> If it's a tool used for your job I'd suggest they spent 30 minutes to learn it.

By all means. How do they know when they're done learning it? It's by definition difficult to tell the difference between missing functionality and hard-to-discover functionality.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#55

Post by kabdib »

kenjackson wrote: post #50
kabdib wrote: post #48

SharePoint has always been a piece of garbage. Unfortunately it's a money making piece of garbage, so there you go. Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole separa…

When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there, Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.

Except that search was always borked, for various reasons (one really special reason was that search was utterly global, and didn't obey the access rules that were so vigorously enforced elsewhere, exposing details of your Super Secret Project to the rest of the company). So search was turned off, and good luck finding anything. Sheesh.

And getting history out was, to put it mildly, a pain in the rear. Something I could do in five seconds became a nightmare of bad web UI.

Anyway, the devs in my group had a rule of keeping docs in the source depots, and we never lost anything. Poor other groups, we saw them lose important design documents when IT decided that the two year old SP wasn't being used anymore and got recycled. Wow.

Maybe SP does all that whizzy stuff. I just saw it being unutterably stupid, slow and unreliable in practice.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#56

Post by lnanek2 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #44
marshray wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying this is impossible, but I think it would be an instructive exercise: Please name three nontrivial, commercial, end-user facing apps or services that know nothing about any file or document types.

Only file synchronization tools (commercial or not) could ever fit that description, any other kind of tool must manipulate some kind of file. The only problem is that we are talking exactly about a file synchronization tool. Thus the exercise isn't as valuable as it may appear at first.

I think he has a good point. For example, DropBox has lots of special handling for image types. It has a special folder for sharing them, it has auto image upload from the places phones tend to store them, etc.. Google similarly has auto-image upload and enhancement, and they have a ton of special handling for office documents that can interconvert them. So DropBox and Google Drive are both examples of cases where special things are done by knowing about file types. I can't really think of any service that doesn't. Maybe rsync run by cron or Tarsnap, but only us techies ever use that. Even then, most compression schemes can recognize compressed files vs. uncompressed and not recompress them - like ZIP utils storing files vs. compressing them when building an archive.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#57

Post by natch »

kenjackson wrote: post #50
kabdib wrote: post #48

SharePoint has always been a piece of garbage. Unfortunately it's a money making piece of garbage, so there you go. Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole separa…

When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there, Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.

>Except SharePoint does store history and you can...

It does until it doesn't. Just like "Plays for Sure(TM)," also from MS, worked until it didn't.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#58

Post by jimbobimbo »

nickbarnwell wrote: post #14
danbruc wrote: post #6

IIRC OneDrive for Business is not your average cloud storage but build on top of SharePoint (unlike the normal OneDrive). Therefore this might be some kind of side effect due to way SharePoint handles documents and document versioning. It is definitely unexpected behavior but this might be a reason explaining it without bad intent on Microsoft's side.

To expand on that, OneDrive for Business (a product formerly known as: SkyDrive Pro, Live Mesh, Grove Workspace etc.) shares the OneDrive branding (and some? interface components) but otherwise bears little resemblance to its consumer counterpart. IIRC the Office Org owns the SharePoint client while OneDrive proper is handled by the Windows Services team.

OD4B has nothing to do with Mesh.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#60

Post by hrabago »

natch wrote: post #57
kenjackson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there, Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.

>Except SharePoint does store history and you can... It does until it doesn't. Just like "Plays for Sure(TM)," also from MS, worked until it didn't.

> Just like "Plays for Sure(TM)," also from MS, worked until it didn't.

Are you referring to unintended technical defects or DRM?

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