OneDrive For Business / Personal – Confusion & Fit For Purpose?
Previously, OneDrive and OneDrive For Business (ODFB) were hardly worth wasting time on, unless you had the patience of a saint and didn’t mind performing basic QA and bug-verification for Microsoft. Now, they have moved on… at last!
It obviously took a lot to catch up with DropBox et al, even though the method of working through the desktop’s Windows Explorer was very familiar… but the same set of files could take hours or days on ODFB to sync over a broadband connection, whereas oddly enough, the same files and machine took Dropbox simply minutes! That seems to have been resolved now, and the sync does at last work, even on non fibre corporate networks.
But even if prepared to give ODFB a shot, confusion would kick in when you realised Microsoft had already prepared you for OneDrive personal, because on Windows 8+ you needed a Microsoft Account to login, and they used that to wire you up for all sorts of things, including OneDrive. So when it came to considering ODFB, you’d wonder if it would fall over the existing OneDrive – not helped by the similarity of names, and worry over all the previous incarnations (SkyDrive, Groove etc).
The best path now is to upgrade to Windows 10 (8 and even 8.1 being the new “Vista”), and that, or Office 2016, will install the latest sync client, rather than an old one still hanging around – see the KB https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/2903984. Annoying we should even have to think about “previous sync clients” etc (shouldn’t all those Windows Updates simply replace with a consolidated and working client?), but the process does work out. Check out that KB (you’ll be prompted to as soon as you hit “sync”) but the key take-away is you can simply check your Task Tray for the White Cloud being personal OneDrive, and Blue Cloud being ODFB once you’ve added the extra account!
Good news is that both OneDrive personal and ODFB simply co-exist and don’t mess each other up. As you can see on the screenshot, they simply create their own Folder and you can drop your files, even move them between them effortlessly, and everything is automatically synced to the cloud, so you can go to your Office 365 Portal on a browser and hit “OneDrive” to open up your ODFB files wherever you are. That’s what the name “OneDrive” was supposed to imply, and now it’s actually getting there!
Maybe you’ll hit issues, so far the going is good, much better than before – but when you do, you can get proper support by raising an O365 ticket – and the specialist OneDrive team will address any problem without so much confuddle – that confidence alone is worth the effort to reconsider ODFB. It comes with Office 365.