I have defined the SharePoint Online URL as a trusted site via GPO. And have defined the URL of the library as a network drive path. But the network drive is not displayed. Also when i try to add it manually in windows explorer (clinet pc) as network drive, i get following error: 'Access Denied. There are good reasons to map SharePoint as a network drive. So I’ve taken a bit of heat from some of my fellow SharePoint geeks over a recent post on how to map a SharePoint library (or site.
- Map Sharepoint Document Library As Network Drive Mac Os
- Map Sharepoint Document Library As Network Drive Mac Download
- Map Sharepoint Online Library As Network Drive
These days my primary laptop is an Apple Macbook Pro 13″ — it is a pretty sweet piece of hardware. There’s plenty of other folks in the SharePoint community that have been making a similar switch recently like Andrew Connell and Jeremy Thake and Sahil Malik. Everyone seems to be singing the same praise for the Macbook Pros and perhaps surprisingly most that have made the switch are choosing to run in OSX as their primary operating system.
I’ve been running this setup since last summer but most days when I’m SharePointing I use my Windows desktop. As I was getting ready for the upcoming SharePoint Conference, I was preparing for the session I’m co-presenting with Randy Drisgill called Branding Internet facing web sites with SharePoint in the cloud (which you should come see!) I was running through some of the demos and realized that I should probably try to do them on my MBP. One of the demos involves the Design Manager connecting to an SharePoint Online site in Office365. No problem right? Wrong.
The usual steps of connecting to an external didn’t work (open up Finder, then Go > Connect to Server). I scoured the interwebs looking for an answer, I tried emailing different folks at Microsoft, and didn’t really have much luck. At that point I did what everyone else would probably do: I complained on Facebook. I’m glad I did because I found the answer in an unlikely place — from the husband of someone I went to high school (maybe even middle school?) with. Big thanks to Scott Newsome!
Here’s how you connect your Mac with OSX to a SharePoint library — this requires Office for Mac 2011:
- From Spotlight look for “Microsoft Document Connection” and open it.
- Click on the “Add Location” button in the upper left and choose to “Connect to a SharePoint Site…”
- Press the Connect button.
And that’s it. Hopefully this helps other folks trying to do the same thing. This helped in my scenario but the tool itself isn’t perfect — for more information on the limitations check out: http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2013/01/office-for-mac-2011-document-connection/
Map Sharepoint Document Library As Network Drive Mac Os
[UPDATE: Dux reminded me of this great post he wrote on using SharePoint with a Mac. Tons of great info here: http://meetdux.com/2010/04/06/sharepoint-2010-mac-ipad-iphone-ipod/ ]
Enjoy!
Reviewing the latest OneDrive features I wanted to try the new AutoMountTeamSites setting which lets you preconfigure SharePoint online sites to sync automatically for defined users and devices.
Updated on 12.07.2019: Included the Intune administrative template configuration
The setting is officially described as follow:
This setting lets you specify SharePoint team site libraries to sync automatically the next time users sign in to the OneDrive sync client. (Microsoft)
If you enable this setting, the OneDrive sync client will automatically download the contents of the libraries you specified as online-only files the next time the user signs in. The user won’t be able to stop syncing the libraries. (Microsoft)
Prerequisites
In order to get things up an running we need at least:
- OneDrive sync client version 19.012.0121.0011 or newer
- Windows 10 Version 1709 or newer
- OneDrive Files On-Demand enabled (described below)
Be aware that this feature is not supported with on-premises SharePoint sites and not recommended to enable this setting for more than 1’000 devices. The device limit is related to the Windows Push Notification Service which tells the OneDrive clients when a file change occurs on a server side. When you exceed that limit clients will find themselves in a polling mode. Hans Brender explains this behavior well on his blog.
Gathering the SharePoint library ID
We need to gather the SharePoint library ID which is an encoded HTML URL of your SharePoint library. To get the library ID navigate to your SharePoint site, click Sync and then Copy library ID.
Intune Administrative Template configuration
Create a new device configuration profile in Intune and select Administrative Template as type:
- To find all OneDrive policies enter “OneDrive” as search criteria
- Look for the “Use OneDrive Files On-Demand” setting and enable it
- Look for the “configure team site libraries to sync automatically” setting which is available in the machine and user context
- Enter a friendly Name for your library and paste-in the copied SharePoint library ID from above
- Please note that the Name property is only used for better recognition of the setting and has no impact on your end devices - where the original name of the SharePoint library will be displayed.
Additional policies
For a better user experience I recommend you to configure the: “Silently sign in users to the OneDrive sync client with their Windows credentials” as well, assuming your devices are Hybrid Azure AD Joined or Azure AD Joined then OneDrive get’s automatically provisioned.
Intune ADMX ingestion (superseded)
Map Sharepoint Document Library As Network Drive Mac Download
Normally I’m a fan of Intune OMA-URI and ADMX Backend Policies to deploy GPO settings with Intune. Unfortunately I had a lot of issues for this setting and kept testing for a long time. I was able to write values into the registry with URL’s like “tech.nicolonsky.ch” but not with encoded SharePoint library ID’s. This resolves to a problem with the Windows 10 client side MDM extension because it cannot process the encoded SharePoint Library ID string.
Registry configuration
Enabling the feature with the Windows registry is quite easy and may be suitable if you cannot use device management capabilities like Intune MDM or Group Policy. We simply need to set a registry key under the following location:
HKLM:SOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftOneDriveTenantAutoMount
Choose a suitable name (this has no technical impact as the original SharePoint library name is used) as value use the copied SharePoint library ID from above.
PowerShell snippet
To set the registry key with an (Intune) PowerShell script you can use the following snippet and update it with your values:
Map Sharepoint Online Library As Network Drive
End user experience
After the next sign-in it took a few minutes and the SharePoint library was visible on my lab-machine:
Please note that it can take up to 8 hours to apply the setting, as documented by Microsoft.