Do We Still Need File Protocols Today?
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Sharepoint is a great solution and there is a reason that Microsoft classifies it as just a part of MS Office. Sharepoint truly is the "server" component of the full MS Office package and really does take it from "clunky" to "elegant." It's an amazing pairing.
But Sharepoint is only the first step. Is all of that data, 100GB, all MS Office files? If so, why? Maybe that is necessary but in a smaller organization that seems like an awful lot. Just as we were talking about moving unstructured data to structure at a high level by moving away from the unstructured file server model, likewise office suites are generally unstructured data that is useful for one off scenarios (don't need a bit application when Excel can do this for a one time need, for example) but are poor for large scale data creation and organization.
In most cases I would say that yes, you move to Sharepoint for what must remain in MS Office. But you consider other tooling when possible.
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Our onsite SMB shares are 100 GB or less, probably a lot less. 30% might be Office type documents. The rest are installers, drivers, other IT files. Those files probably won't work well on SharePoint.
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Additionally, considerations on backup solutions have to be considered. In the past backup solutions usually had additional costs for backing up DBs like SharePoint.
Though I think that might be changing. -
@Dashrender said:
Our onsite SMB shares are 100 GB or less, probably a lot less. 30% might be Office type documents. The rest are installers, drivers, other IT files. Those files probably won't work well on SharePoint.
IT files would rarely be good to put into Sharepoint. The traditional filesystem is specifically designed around executables. Installers and drivers would be things to probably keep on a network share. But they are also things that can be read only and not exposed from a security standpoint.
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@Dashrender said:
Additionally, considerations on backup solutions have to be considered. In the past backup solutions usually had additional costs for backing up DBs like SharePoint.
Though I think that might be changing.You could always back it up like a normal file. Just like any file, it needs to not be in use during the backup process. You can either pause the database and back it up normally. Or you can have the database itself take a backup to filesystem which is then backed up.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Our onsite SMB shares are 100 GB or less, probably a lot less. 30% might be Office type documents. The rest are installers, drivers, other IT files. Those files probably won't work well on SharePoint.
IT files would rarely be good to put into Sharepoint. The traditional filesystem is specifically designed around executables. Installers and drivers would be things to probably keep on a network share. But they are also things that can be read only and not exposed from a security standpoint.
Exactly, I do have my directories set to read-only or no access for the rest of the staff, for exactly the reasons you've previously mentioned.
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Ouch... Just looked up SharePoint licensing for on-prem. Assuming you need more than the essentials, just damn... really makes O365 that much more worth while!
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@Dashrender said:
Ouch... Just looked up SharePoint licensing for on-prem. Assuming you need more than the essentials, just damn... really makes O365 that much more worth while!
No, not cheap at all. Sharepoint has been Microsoft flagship for a dozen years. It needs SQL Server to run too. It's a mammoth application handling so many different things. It has never been cheap once you get outside of the basics. But even the basics are really good.
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@Dashrender said:
Assuming you need more than the essentials,
The first question is why do you need more than Foundation? What extra features do you need?
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@scottalanmiller said:
But you consider other tooling when possible.
Such as? SharePoint is great for using Office documents in IE in a relatively stable and controlled environment (such as the Accounts Department for example, who are mostly working collaboratively in Excel, Word and Acrobat), but outside of that it can be a bit limiting.
If you'd asked me 20 years ago if mapped drives would still be so popular today, I wouldn't have believed you. I haven't used them for years, but other users here still do for historical reasons. I use hidden file shares and place a link to the share in users' Favourites folder (now called Quick Access in Windows 10), which works pretty well. The thing I love about the file server is that Windows Explorer is just a great application. It is so much more powerful and flexible than a browser. I find working in SharePoint like walking in mud compared with Windows Explorer. That may be partly be a lack of familiarity in SharePoint on my part. I know you can use Windows Explorer to access files in SharePoint, but that seems to be defeating the object, so I've tried to avoid it.
The only thing I don't like about Windows Explorer compared with SharePoint, is its crap search functionality.
I'd love to hear about people's experiences with other tools.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
Assuming you need more than the essentials,
The first question is why do you need more than Foundation? What extra features do you need?
Lots of great features, easily worth the extra money. But the extra features here would not be ones related to the topic at hand. All of the features needed for this are included in the free tier.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I find working in SharePoint like walking in mud compared with Windows Explorer.
I would mostly agree, other than the search which is what I use and it often makes it quite a bit better for me. But what I really do is work from the interfaces inside of Word, Excel, OneNote, etc. I don't use Windows Explorer or Sharepoint's own interface. Instead I use the application that talks directly to Sharepoint and it gives me a dedicated interface inside of the app so that I use only that.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
But you consider other tooling when possible.
Such as?
Just as Sharepoint is a custom server component of the MS Office ecosystem to give it a structured data handling capability, different applications would use their own appropriate server component. It would depend on the application or need in question.
Not all applications offer a structured back end storage system today, but more and more this is becoming the case. There is nothing that we (at @ntg) use that isn't structured. Most enterprise software is structured out of the box with data being stored in a database rather than being dumped ad hoc to a filesystem.
Some things like CAD systems still produce standard files, but even CAD systems are starting to look at alternatives and I've heard of some providing servers rather than using the file system. Just as at the filesystem level you need the logic of NAS or a file server to handle gatekeeping for filesystem access that a SAN would recklessly expose, structured data handling systems can do the same thing at the file level or data level so that there are gatekeeping services for actual data, not just the filesystem. This allows for cool features like simultaneous editing of the same work, more protection of the data, etc.
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Once you have made the jump from File Servers to say... O365 + Hosted Sharepoint... The problem then becomes how do you back up the data that is hosted? Do you trust your provider to do that for you? (@scottalanmiller , I know you have had problems with O365 eating stuff like files and emails)...
Or are there some other applications that are available to help you do this?
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Yes, there are backup services for Office 365. And there are applications like Outlook and ODfB Sync Tool that will make local copies on user by user basis.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I find working in SharePoint like walking in mud compared with Windows Explorer.
I would mostly agree, other than the search which is what I use and it often makes it quite a bit better for me. But what I really do is work from the interfaces inside of Word, Excel, OneNote, etc. I don't use Windows Explorer or Sharepoint's own interface. Instead I use the application that talks directly to Sharepoint and it gives me a dedicated interface inside of the app so that I use only that.
And I've been walking people AWAY from that method for years. The biggest problem with using the app to do the file finding is if you are in the wrong app compared to the file.
My boss once came to me frantically looking for a file. She was in Word looking for a a file she couldn't find. I had her drop to Explorer and low and behold there was her file. It was an Excel file.
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Along the lines of making things more mobile/universal, even Nuance now has a hosted Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) solution - I'll be looking into the costs of that soon. Currently DNS requires a network share to host the user files so people can roam from machine to machine.
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@Dashrender said:
And I've been walking people AWAY from that method for years. The biggest problem with using the app to do the file finding is if you are in the wrong app compared to the file.
Doesn't that solve the problem? It keeps you from opening the wrong file types.
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@Dashrender said:
Currently DNS requires a network share to host the user files so people can roam from machine to machine.
I think you lost me on this one.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Currently DNS requires a network share to host the user files so people can roam from machine to machine.
I think you lost me on this one.
Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) requires an SMB share to store user settings files... it is kind of a pain.
