This forum is full of IT managers so I thought it would be a good place to ask.

My work (grant making charity, 30 employees, two geographically distinct offices though people work on the move a lot visiting funded organisations) is going through a “digital transformation”.

Before transformation:
Office 365 for emails – works well. Noone uses the other MS features and generally access emails through desktop Outlook application.

Everyone remote desktops to a virtual desktop hosted on Windows Multipoint Server (hosted locally). Terminals are little linux boxes or Windows laptops. This kind of works well, but connection can be slow/kicks you off a lot. Too slow to watch a video. Can’t use webcams/speakers/headphones/microphones.

Local network drive (badly organised, no metadata etc) holds all files. Most info on the main process (making grants) is kept on a 10 year old Access database. Or spreadsheets. Or scraps of paper.

Current plan:
Main grant making process: Employing a company to build a Salesforce application for us. All good. Appropriate budget in place and this is moving along.

File storage/collaboration. This is a sticking point. We’d like to move to a totally cloud based system and do everything through a browser/app and be able to do realtime collaboration. But OneDrive for Business seems too awkward/limited – especially in its in-system file previewing/editing, user access controls and sharing/collaboration.
Sharepoint is not intuitive enough for the people here to work with and the way the two are linked is confusing from a management perspective. It also seems designed to work as a hybrid system across desktop applications and browser/cloud

Box seems to address some of those issues and gives us more information about who is accessing files and would let us work with external people more easily than OneDrive.
It also seems to have good links with Ooutlook/365 and Salesforce.

We’d like to significantly cut back on our local IT support provision and get new hardware that means we don’t need to have the extra remote/virtual desktop layer. We’re looking at using a lot more video calling in lieu of travelling too.

I dunno, does that make sense?

We have OneDrive but most people use DropBox for sharing files etc as we were all using it before MS came up with their version and it just works….

I back my whole laptop up to DropBox and thus can access anything from my phone etc when I’m not at my desk.

We also have SalesForce for manging Customers / forecasts etc, although the biggest problem is that no one updates it, so the information in it is always out of date, hence the forecasts are pretty worthless…..

Yeah, getting everyone onto it is a big issue however senior management is behind the change, I’m just implementing it for them. Plus part of my role is training and helping people with the transition.

We have One Drive and Sharepoint, in principal it should be ideal. However, it has a few quirks and I have had weird sync issues, some documents not visible after updates by others etc. The check out facility is strange and seems to act differently every time I use it. The online interface is rubbish.

Basically I think it’s shit and much preferred Dropbox that we used to use.

MS aren’t really in the business of making OneDrive for Business or SharePoint work like the way a lot of people want to work. Because they’re fairly cheap (especially for Charities) it looks like a nice cheap ‘cloud solution’.

I’m not 100% up to date with Azure for non-profit pricing but you should take the time to research that, I’m sure it’s a very generous offering. You might find it’s free or next to free to set up a very good, proper cloud based server for file sharing. If you’re dealing with big files RDS might still be the way to go, but as you’ve highlighted it’s got it’s limitations.

Where are you based OP?

I also find our company Sharepoint/Office 365 all a bit crap.

So I use google drive, as do some others – because it really does ‘just work’. other folk use dropbox. it’s a bit of a free-for-all. a few use sharepoint but mainly in sales as CRM is forced upon them.

I’m up in Scotland. Will investigate Azure but it looks like overkill…

What about trying Lotus Notes?

IGMC.

We use Box, everything is encrypted.

The desktop client is not as good or unobtrusive as dropbox/onedrive.

I use the office online integration a lot working on collaborative documents. But many features missing from that vs the desktop apps.

Wzzzz, anything else you haven’t liked about Box?

Much prefer Onedrive as it has full integration in Windows and Office products. Onedrive for Business app is now the same front end essentially as the personal version too, plus can nicely sync both personal and work accounts on the same machine. And you of course get 1TB storage with 365 subscriptions, personal and business. Onedrive clients on mobile work well also.

Back end of Onedrive for bus is of course sharepoint based but you can steer clear of sharepoint generally. Word etc will still do the collaborative stuff due to the back end but without dumping you into sharepoint web site garbage. Still may need to go into SharePoint to set up team projects though.

Stuff shared with me on dropbox is always a faff and I’d prefer not to install the client. Free storage is poor and paid is okay, but Office 365 gets you Office sub as well as the storage. Way better value.

All cloud and everything in a browser – Office browser apps really are very good and kick Google’s ass. Likewise the mobile apps. With Box/Dropbox etc you’re going to be stuck. Only decent alternative to Office on the web is Google and that really requires Google Drive (which is a bit rubbish).

I think you should factor in some Sharepoint consultancy and make that work for you.

Or look into Teams and change your work style a bit to match. It’s young, but probably the best bet if you’re bought into 365 (and I think that is a good shout fwiw).

Wzzzz, anything else you haven’t liked about Box?

It can be rather annoying merging changes if two people open a doc and work on it at the same time locally. Try to use word online if thats happening. But that happens with all of them.

We have office 365 too btw, just we are supposed to use box rather than one drive as that meets our data policy.

Erm I’m not sure whats not to like. I tend to interact with it through the website rather than using the local sync on my mac.

A folder full of images isn’t presented on the web interface as a gallery like onedrive does.

I wouldn’t go near sharepoint with a bargepole.