Mapped SharePoint Drives?

[Brennan Price]

Hello there,

 

I am hoping some members in the community here may have some experience with what the title suggests, I'll lay out the situation below: 

 

I am an IT admin for various schools in the South West of the UK, the Main school I work at however is what I am having issues with. The network there is a plain and simple Vanilla Windows network with each user getting their own user account and an email with Microsoft Office 365 A1 Plus.

 

With Corona Virus still lurking and likely to be lurking for a while, I have moved my whole workplace/school environment over to Microsoft Office Online, SharePoint and OneDrive so that my user base does not rely so much on the storage, servers and internet connection of my work place/school. Albeit what I have got is still very quick but that's not the point, it just gives me plenty of wiggle room in what I do as well as overhead and plan B options. The Microsoft Office Online Suite was working absolutely fine whilst everyone was working from home and whatnot. However, with students and staff being back in schools at the moment, everyone is trying to access the whole of the Microsoft Office Online and more from within the school through their browsers which is not ideal and has brought up some major headaches for me.

 

Before I made this move, Students used to get their own mapped drives including to the shared drives that now exist within SharePoint, my problem is that with having moved the drives up to SharePoint, the students can no longer gain access to said mapped drives through file explorer since the drives are not internal to the network. Students cannot save files directly to the computer as this is what the mapped drives were for, but since they are gone then the students can no longer save locally, at which point anything outside of the Microsoft Office Online Suite is currently out of the question.

 

So here's my question:

 

Is there a way I can map the areas I want from SharePoint to the students within Active directory? I ask because I am currently running into issues with the drive maps not recognizing the pupils logged in, at which point the drive has a simple red cross on it and it won't bring up anything to authenticate them.

 

I understand that the simpler option is to let the students use OneDrive for Business but then this stores a cache of each users area on each computer, storage on each machine would go through the roof which is not what I want.

 

I look forward to hearing some of your answers, experiences and/or solutions.

 

Cheers, Brennan.

[Radium_Angel]

21 minutes ago, Brennan Price said:

I look forward to hearing some of your answers, experiences and/or solutions.

As much as it pains me to say this, There is a Network Admin section over at ArsTechnica, that will get you a field of people with far greater range of experience in this sort of thing, than you will find here. I'd suggest dropping by them for a visit for this question.

[Master Disaster]

19 minutes ago, Brennan Price said:

Hello there,

 

I am hoping some members in the community here may have some experience with what the title suggests, I'll lay out the situation below: 

 

I am an IT admin for various schools in the South West of the UK, the Main school I work at however is what I am having issues with. The network there is a plain and simple Vanilla Windows network with each user getting their own user account and an email with Microsoft Office 365 A1 Plus.

 

With Corona Virus still lurking and likely to be lurking for a while, I have moved my whole workplace/school environment over to Microsoft Office Online, SharePoint and OneDrive so that my user base does not rely so much on the storage, servers and internet connection of my work place/school. Albeit what I have got is still very quick but that's not the point, it just gives me plenty of wiggle room in what I do as well as overhead and plan B options. The Microsoft Office Online Suite was working absolutely fine whilst everyone was working from home and whatnot. However, with students and staff being back in schools at the moment, everyone is trying to access the whole of the Microsoft Office Online and more from within the school through their browsers which is not ideal and has brought up some major headaches for me.

 

Before I made this move, Students used to get their own mapped drives including to the shared drives that now exist within SharePoint, my problem is that with having moved the drives up to SharePoint, the students can no longer gain access to said mapped drives through file explorer since the drives are not internal to the network. Students cannot save files directly to the computer as this is what the mapped drives were for, but since they are gone then the students can no longer save locally, at which point anything outside of the Microsoft Office Online Suite is currently out of the question.

 

So here's my question:

 

Is there a way I can map the areas I want from SharePoint to the students within Active directory? I ask because I am currently running into issues with the drive maps not recognizing the pupils logged in, at which point the drive has a simple red cross on it and it won't bring up anything to authenticate them.

 

I understand that the simpler option is to let the students use OneDrive for Business but then this stores a cache of each users area on each computer, storage on each machine would go through the roof which is not what I want.

 

I look forward to hearing some of your answers, experiences and/or solutions.

 

Cheers, Brennan.

You can map your sharepoint URL directly in Explorer and it will mount as network storage. The only issue I see is permission & access handling. You might have to create a separate folder for each user then mount on a per user basis using a log on script.

 

https://www.clouddirect.net/knowledge-base/KB0011543/mapping-a-sharepoint-site-as-a-network-drive

[Brennan Price]

32 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

As much as it pains me to say this, There is a Network Admin section over at ArsTechnica, that will get you a field of people with far greater range of experience in this sort of thing, than you will find here. I'd suggest dropping by them for a visit for this question.

Thanks for the information, I'll give that a go. Cheers!

[Brennan Price]

33 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

You can map your sharepoint URL directly in Explorer and it will mount as network storage. The only issue I see is permission & access handling. You might have to create a separate folder for each user then mount on a per user basis using a log on script.

 

https://www.clouddirect.net/knowledge-base/KB0011543/mapping-a-sharepoint-site-as-a-network-drive

Thanks for the info, I can get users to map the drive themselves but I'd rather not have close to 800+ students have to map their own drives as this is a pain and confusing for them sadly, plus they'd have to do this every time they logged onto each computer. A log-on script is also a good idea too but only for a single user, I cannot write a single script that will authenticate every user sadly. Scripts also aren't very consistent sadly.