I'm scoping a project we have been asked to look at where Sharepoint Online is being suggested as a replacement for a shared network drive. Currently the business have a simple web app that's just a series of web pages running from a shared network folder, providing a simple search function and visibility of some shared folders with around 100GB of information.
The key requirement is that this information is available offline to the engineers that need it. It's a mixture of product documentation and firmware files that engineers need when visiting customer sites. They only require a subset of this information, the product models they are interested in.
We can build a sharepoint site that does most of what is being requested (it also needs to be a place for bulletins to be published for example) but the offline sync is what I'm struggling with at the moment.
I know you can sync an Document Library from Sharepoint to your local machine, but can we do this selectively based on a user profile in the sharepoint site? I was thinking about permissions on the files within a SP Document Library, maybe rely on them to only sync the files a user has access to but the reality is they might need access to everything but only be interested in a few files.
The requirements I have mention OneDrive all over the place, and having a facility to notify the end user they will run out of space, or delete offline files automatically that aren't being used very often.
Does this sound feasible? Or even remotely possible?
This does work and we have setup environments with users using One Drive for Business and replacing their network drives.
Users would have to sync each library that they require, even if they are only interested in certain files. However with the newer version of ODFB client most of the files can be stored in ODFB so that the user only stores the files they need on their computer. There is a handy stub stored on the users computer and if they need they file they can open it and it will download. Or from the right click menu they can choose to make these files/folders available offline always.
You can't do this selectively per user per site. The user must click Sync. Any permissions on folders will be carried through and they can only access the content they are allowed to.