Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#81

Post by skriticos2 » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 7:09 AM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #55

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 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 co…

I can relate to your experience.

I have seen SharePoint installations at big corporations and they are horrible.

In one case there was a central SharePoint group that has commissioned the sites. So we had a highly restricted, utterly gutted and badly corporate styled thing that was practically useless.

Add to that that there was a weird mix of public and enterprise editions (which cost a bunch of money and were frowned upon by the org unit).

In this environment you can sit back and watch productivity and common sense being choked to death. Enterprise is a weird place.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#82

Post by Karellen » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 7:32 AM UTC

wmgries wrote: post #45

clemsen wrote: post #3

If this is true then Microsoft will have a hard time convincing the majority of potential users to switch to OneDrive. Although I can imagine possible use cases altering data without user interaction is unacceptable. What if you had a git repository stored there? (Yes I know this belongs somewhere else but some people might want to do it regardless) Although Dropbox apparently looks at the data to create previews for…

This article is about OneDrive for Business, not OneDrive. OneDrive for Business is for business, as the name suggests. SharePoint maybe slow, but it does have features that users in business like, so having OneDrive for Business behave like SharePoint is fine.

So must mean it's just like the difference between Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows 8 Home, yeah? It's exactly the same thing under the hood, but the business edition just has a few extra businessy bits bolted on top, or possibly some restrictive anti-features removed? Because that's how Microsoft branding works, right? Right?

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#83

Post by kreeben » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 8:12 AM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #67

skrebbel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is witty, but I have absolutely no idea what it has to do with OneDrive modifying files. It's not even about Microsoft or the effects of any of their choices or policies - it's about stupid managers.

Well, that. Also about how bad SharePoint is, and the kind of people who think that it's okay, when it's not. I wouldn't put my data there because the types of things you run into on SP are endemic and fractally bad.

"I wouldn't put my data there because the types of things you run into on SP are endemic and fractally bad." Yes, there is nothing good about SP. But have you tried version controlling office files? That's easy right, just save as office xml and push. Oh wait, what is all this? User state in the xml file? Currently active spread sheet tab? Currently selected cell? Nightmare!

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#84

Post by kreeben » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 8:24 AM UTC

mrslx wrote: post #78

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…

So your PM doesn't manage the docs? as in talk to you about what the appropriate output should be and then they collect and handle the organization of it?

There are a few PM's out there like that, but most I have worked with are super excited about jira or sharepoint, love agile (as in "look at all the charts, the customer will be so happy when I show these to him") and asks nothing of his team except to follow his guidelines and everything will be swell. Are all unmindful IT people working with MS and MS-centric customers these days, or do you have them on the other side of the fence too?

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#85

Post by camus2 » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 8:42 AM UTC

jimbobimbo wrote: post #58

nickbarnwell wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

livemesh was the best!

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#86

Post by SixSigma » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 8:59 AM UTC

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…

I work in a drawing office at engineering firm that uses Sharepoint. I wish I could even get anyone to acknowledge that there are such things as versions of files. Our backups are destroyed after 72 hours "to save space", emails are copied manually from Outlook to "emails sent" and "emails received" folders in sharepoint.

The cluelessness and lack of interest from either the IT dept. or anyone really drives me crazy. I just get shoulder shrugs from colleagues when I tell them magical tales from the distant lands of version control.

There's may be a case for pushing hard but I'm leaving in September.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#87

Post by emm » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 9:12 AM UTC

nivla wrote: post #26

0x0 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like "surface" vs "surface pro"!

>Just like "surface" vs "surface pro"! More correctly "Surface RT" vs "Surface Pro". "Surface" was initially Microsoft's interactive table [1], so yeah pretty much a branding disaster if we take a walk down the history lane. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense#Microsoft_...

BTW: Surface / PixelsSnse was the most horrible purchase i / my university ever did. Bought a Samsung SUR40 in January 2012 for about 8000 €. Received it two month later. Another 3 month later Microsoft renamed it to PixelSense and stopped the development. No Windows 8, no Internet Explorer 11 Touch. We use it as a table.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#88

Post by DangerousPie » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 9:14 AM UTC

polemic wrote: post #71

jccooper wrote: post #19

It's almost certainly "accidental" and a relic of some indexing or something that Sharepoint is doing to the documents. I'll bet it recognizes XML-ish content (as the article notes, images and plain text are ignored), tosses it in a validator or something similar that "corrects" the file, and saves that file internally. That's not too unusual in the CMS world. The bad part is that the internal version has found its w…

Sure, but as a cloud sync product it's a "you had one job" situation. Not so much incompetence as a fundamental failure to achieve that basic requirement.

The problem seems to be that this is not primarily a cloud sync product, despite what the name might suggest.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#89

Post by arethuza » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 10:12 AM UTC

ableal wrote: post #68

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…

> a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents "I resemble that remark". Shudder. Such fun, a web implementation of a 1980s folder system, with no possible way of doing an "ls -lr". One gets to click every node in a three or four deep hierarchy to look for a document. Shudder, erase from memory.

To be fair, it doesn't lose your documents, it just makes sure nobody can ever find them again...

Re: Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

#90

Post by arethuza » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 10:16 AM UTC

frik wrote: post #80

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…

I wonder if SharePoint has a future in Microsoft's strategy re-alignment. SharePoint (evolved as Office Server) is a beast of software and many awkward engineering & design choices from the 2003 era are still visible to the end user. And I am not even touching the XHTML tabled based layout with thousands of CSS rules, Silverlight & ActiveX controls, bad WebDAV support, "SharePoint Groups", low soft & hard limits for…

I suspect the curse of backwards compatibility might cause a problem - there are so many systems that have dependencies on SharePoint (including a lot of Microsoft's own products). I found this page the other day which talks about the non-trivial process of picking the right API for talking to SharePoint:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj164060%28v=...

The diagram trying to explain how the different APIs relate is a pretty good visualization of the problems that anyone trying to refactor SharePoint would face.