Item: OneDrive
Rating: 9
Author: Adam Lauer

Overall Satisfaction with OneDrive

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use onedrive as a quick, easy alternative to SharePoint. It is mainly used within select engineering teams and has expanded to IT. It is a tool that each team chooses whether they want to implement it or not. The main benefit of it is it gives us a living document for installs and documentation that can be updated by anyone with access in real time with multiple collaborators.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy storage of Microsoft Office application files
Live collaboration with multiple users
Easy online and native app access

Cons

Sharing is not very granular
Storage limits
Web interface of directory is chunky and not elegant.

Return on Investment

It has made our team much more efficient by easily accessing documents and editing them without having to check them out, edit, and check in. Great time saver.
It allows us to share documents with permissions across teams easily just using email verification instead of creating complicated roles and groups.
It is very similar to Google Drive, but better integrated for Microsoft based companies.

Alternatives Considered

Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox and Google Drive

I would say OneDrive is better than Amazon and Dropbox and about on par with iCloud and Google. OneDrive was best for us since we are a Microsoft shop. Its storage, collaboration, and office integration made it the best option for us. Google Drive is also used by us when interfacing with external clients and contractors.

Likelihood to Recommend

We use it for two main use cases. One is a running installation instructions sheet that developers write up when they are finished with projects and quality assurance uses to install and test the changes. These directions are then given to IT for deployments. It allows for quick transfer of knowledge and lets everyone view and edit it live. The second use case is to store a OneNote Notebook that we call our cheat sheet. It is basically a searchable knowledge base for our team to make us more efficient and quicken new hire's startup time. It is not good for hosting files outside the Office suite such as Visio and coding files.

OneDrive Feature Ratings

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OneDrive: A stripped down, cheaper, more efficient version of SharePoint