Automatically synchronizing SharePoint folders with signed-in Azure users

Question

Hello

I've been trying to find a way to automatically get SharePoint folders synchronized on Azure users. Right now im doing it manually for each and every user and its not practical considering the amount of time I spend on it. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi Dany,

Per your description, my understanding is that:

1. Your company has your own tenant, such as ******@DanyCompany.com, users in your company have email addresses such as ******@DanyCompany.com, ******@DanyCompany.com, etc.
2. Your company has 200 companies as primary customers at present and they have their own tenants, such as ******@abc.com, ******@def.com, etc.
3. In the 200 customers' tenants, they have their own users, with the email addresses such as

*******@abc.com, ******@abc.com, etc. (In the company abc's tenant, managed by ******@abc.com)

*******@def.com, ******@def.com, etc. (In the company def's tenant, managed by ******@def.com)

......

4. Your company can use ******@abc.com, ******@def.com, etc. to login to their corresponding admin portals to manage their users in the 200 companies.
5. Each user (total 1500+) in the 200 companies needs to sync libraries' contents in their companies' SharePoint sites via the OneDrive sync client. Such as

*user1 in company abc, he/she need to login OneDrive sync client by his/her own email address ******@abc.com, and sync libraries' contents from his/her company abc's SharePoint site to his/her computer.

*user1 in company def, he/she need to login OneDrive sync client by his/her own email address ******@def.com, and sync libraries' contents from his/her company def's SharePoint site to his/her computer.

......

6. The trouble at present is that many users in the 200 companies don't know how to sync libraries' contents from their companies' SharePoint sites to their computers. You need to help them do these mechanic steps every day from time to time.

If what I understand is right, my thoughts and suggestion are that:

The premise is the 200 customer companies have their own IT admins, each users' computers are controlled by their companies' IT admin. IT admin can use Group Policy to control their users' computers.

Our goal is to let these IT admins in the 200 customer companies know how to use Group Policy to configure SharePoint libraries to be synced automatically after their users signed into the OneDrive sync client.

That's the easiest method at present I/We can tell you to reduce the workload.

*Before, the worst situation is you need to do these mechanic steps for 1500+ users in the 200 companies.

*Now, you need to let 200 companies' IT admins to know how to let their users' OneDrive sync the libraries' contents in their companies SharePoint sites automatically.

But my/our concerns is that some companies may don't have IT admins or their IT admins don't use Group Policy to control their users' computer due to various reasons. Please check the information above and tell me whether we can move forward. I will provide detailed steps if we can reach a consensus.

Best Regards,

Hugo

Answer 2

Hello Hugo

First of all, pardon me for not being able to to elaborate in a more professional and detailed manner. However after your reading your response I can tell you that we're talking about 200 internal customers. The reason being is that each of our customer have their own admin portal we log onto to manage their azure, exchange, licensing, employees and so on.

I can give you a practical example. So for instance, for employees in company abc.com, we would use ******@abc.com to login to their admin portal. This would be where we'd do all the changes we need related to company ABC.

All the employees would then log in their Windows PC using their company/office credentials for instance, Jack would use: ******@abc.com. Once Jack is logged in, we'd then sync his SharePoint sites created on their own admin portal.

I hope this makes sense. 

Dany

Answer 3

Hi Dany,

Thanks for telling me more information about this problem.

Internal users mean the users in your own Office 365 tenant, external users mean the users in other Office 365 tenants (Per your description, for your tenant, external users means your customer base of around 200 companies and 1500+ employees). When you share a SharePoint folder, you input these employees' email address then you will see an external user prompt that on the Sharing link Panel.

Since Azure is beyond our support scope, I can just know that we can add external users to guest users in our tenant via Azure (Similar as Share SharePoint files/folders to external users via the Specific People permission level. After inputting the verification code and opening the sharing files/folders, these external users will become the tenant's guest users) but not sure the detailed steps. And this may be different from the words "integrate all our customers to Microsoft Azure" you've said. If what I understanding is not correct, please kindly point out.

For the article: Use Group Policy to control OneDrive sync client settings, it is for IT admins who manage the new OneDrive sync client in a Windows Server enterprise environment that uses Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), company's IT admin control users computer via Group Policy, so we don't need to configure this on all customers' PC. I'm thinking that you can teach other companies' IT to configure SharePoint libraries to be synced automatically after their users signed into the OneDrive sync client.

*200 companies 1500+ employees, every company won't have more than 1000 employees, am I right?

I may need some time to test this feature with external users (Sync SharePoint libraries after signed in to OneDrive sync client) and you can tell me your thoughts or the differences between my thoughts and the actual on this problem anytime.

Regards,

Hugo

Answer 4

Sorry I should've been more detailed here.

Right now we have a customer base of around 200 companies and 1500+ employees. We manage their IT and we've recently decided to integrate all our customers to Microsoft Azure. And we found that SharePoint and Teams worked much better than other cloud-storage solution for our customers to store and access their data. Our main struggle is that, most of our customers and their employees doesn't know how to sync sites with their OneDrive. So we almost get 30 calls a day asking for our help to do it for them. And so far we've been doing it manually by remoting their PC > SharePoint online > Sync site with OneDrive -which isn't very practical or smart. Therefor, we'd really like to find a long-term solution to bring more value to work.

I've been looking at the article you've sent me and can't really figure out if this is something we have to do on all our customers PC's?? We're talking about 1500 PC's so this wouldn't be practical either. Also, I'm not quite sure what you mean by internal v. external Azure users. Could you explain this? -But please let me know what your thoughts are or if there are easier alternatives. We'd really appreciate it! :-)

Thank you

Dany

Answer 5

Hi DKK_99,

Do you mean you want to configure SharePoint libraries to be synced automatically after users signed into the OneDrive sync client?

If so, this article: Use Group Policy to control OneDrive sync client settings(The "Configure team site libraries to sync automatically" section) may be useful for you. There may have some differences between the internal users and external users added by Azure.

If this is not the case, could you tell me more detailed information about this problem?

Regards,

Hugo