OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive, Oh My! My Team's decision to settle on OneDrive for Knowledge Management
December 23, 2018
OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive, Oh My! My Team's decision to settle on OneDrive for Knowledge Management
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with OneDrive
Our organization moved away from a mix of Dropbox and Google Drive to using OneDrive/SharePoint as our knowledge management / information architecture solution. It's being used organization-wide, albeit with some stragglers still using Google Drive for some collaborative editing, and others occasionally still using email attachments to circulate documents and collaborate.
OneDrive, in concert with SharePoint, allows our team to synchronize their work to our cloud storage, collaborate in real-time, share links to documents rather than send attachments and track changes, and control permissions to individual folders or documents to allow for collaboration with external partners as well as restrict access based on roles internally.
OneDrive, in concert with SharePoint, allows our team to synchronize their work to our cloud storage, collaborate in real-time, share links to documents rather than send attachments and track changes, and control permissions to individual folders or documents to allow for collaboration with external partners as well as restrict access based on roles internally.
- OneDrive integrates with my MacBook fairly well, allowing me to share documents and move fairly seamlessly between local and web versions of a file.
- OneDrive keeps things in sync fairly quickly and without consuming a lot of system resources.
- OneDrive (along with Sharepoint's) permissions capabilities are much more fine-grained than Dropbox.
- OneDrive's visual feedback in Finder as to whether a file is syncing or already synced isn't always up-to-date with the actual status of these files.
- OneDrive (on Mac) will occasionally fail to sync for errors that aren't accurate, requiring a restart.
- OneDrive (on Mac) will occasionally fail for file name issues, where filenames allowed on Mac are not allowed on SharePoint, without providing an easy mechanism for fixing them.
- The real-time collaborative editing user experience is not as good as Google Drive.
- We have seen some productivity gains for those team members that are fully utilizing the full MS Office suite, including Microsoft Project. Having a more fully-integrated knowledge- and project-management solution is a vast efficiency improvement.
- We are also able to more effectively collaborate with external partners, by granting access to specific folders within our document repository.
- We are able to more effectively collaborate internally with these fine-grained access controls as well, whereas previously an entirely separate Dropbox area was needed for sensitive documents (budgets, salary information, W-9s, contracts, etc)
- Some permissions issues (bugs where subfolders don't inherit permissions appropriately) occasionally cause loss of trust in the product with some team members, causing them to fall back to other tools and fragmenting our document repository.
As previously mentioned, Google Drive is better for real-time collaboration, but not as intuitive when it comes to staying organized within a folder structure. Permissions model is easy to use but fairly unsophisticated.
Dropbox doesn't offer real-time collaboration at all (to my knowledge), and doesn't offer the same fine-grained permissions that OneDrive does. It is a decent document store and not much else.
Dropbox doesn't offer real-time collaboration at all (to my knowledge), and doesn't offer the same fine-grained permissions that OneDrive does. It is a decent document store and not much else.