Microsoft OneDrive is a platform that allows users within organizations to seamlessly create, share, collaborate and secure documents and files.
However, with so many users relying on OneDrive, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) must develop robust strategies and understand how to stay ahead of these ECM environments.
Reveille delivers a suite of proactive monitoring solutions to simplify OneDrive management. MSPs can leverage all the necessary insights to streamline file syncing and sharing while ensuring security and compliance.
This guide explores the importance of OneDrive management for MSPs and strategies to get ahead of this platform.
Table of Contents
- Importance of OneDrive Management for MSPs
- Strategies for MSPs Managing OneDrive
- Manage OneDrive with Reveille
Importance of OneDrive Management for MSPs
OneDrive for businesses is a fully featured, intuitive platform that supports file sync and share services on an individual user level.
MSPs must understand how to manage OneDrive for enterprises, which allows users to streamline file storage and optimize data security through access control and custom permissions. When handling high volumes of documents spread across multiple OneDrive folders, it’s easy for MSPs to lose track of deleted files, sensitive information, and potential security risks.
A robust management strategy is a must. Understanding how to save documents to the cloud and customize OneDrive to meet specific organizational needs will ensure a smooth performance.
With Reveille for Microsoft, MSPs can gain complete control and visibility of the M365 stack they manage. They can gain insights into OneDrive performance, how users navigate OneDrive, which documents have been accessed, and how they are shared and stored.
Strategies for MSPs Managing OneDrive
Managing OneDrive clients requires a strategic approach to maintain optimal performance and streamline document management processes.
Here are the top strategies for MSPs managing OneDrive.
Setting Up and Configuring OneDrive for Business Customers
The first step to managing OneDrive is to set it up and configure the environment according to the business’s requirements. MSPs need to install OneDrive before configuring it. Here’s how they can do this:
- Install OneDrive via the following link: OneDrive for Business
- Select “Download”
- Click “Save” and then, when prompted, “Run” the OneDriveSetup.exe application
Next, MSPs must configure OneDrive:
- Click the “Start” menu
- Open the OneDrive application
- Enter your Microsoft 365 email address and choose “Sign In”
- Enter your Microsoft 365 account password and select “Sign In”
- Navigate through the tutorial and choose “Open my OneDrive folder”
After configuration, MSPs must upload business files to OneDrive. This is very straightforward. These are the steps to upload files to OneDrive:
- Open FileExplorer, and choose the relevant OneDrive folder
- Click, drag, copy, and paste the file into the OneDrive folder
MSPs must repeat this process for each folder an organization requires. It’s best to automate this process and avoid manually organizing each document in the correct folder. Automation tools will streamline this process and help MSPs save time to focus on more resource-intensive tasks.
Customize OneDrive for Businesses
MSPs can customize OneDrive because they may be SharePoint sites or fulfill organizational requirements. Here are guidelines for how MSPs should customize their OneDrive site:
- Use Microsoft 365 themes to apply branding customizations
- Navigate to the CSS options to adjust some CSS settings if Microsoft 365 isn’t sufficient
- MSPs can modify or hide OneDrive functionalities using JavaScript embedding
- Use CSOM to control regional or language settings
- Avoid customizing OneDrive through custom master pages
An MSP’s exact approach relies on business requirements, goals, and resources. There are options for customizing OneDrive, including:
- Pre-creating and applying configuration for customization. This option is best for MSPs to avoid users needing access to the OneDrive site before it’s created. MSPs must use a new API that enables Microsoft to create OneDrive sites for a specific user.
- Creating a remote time job based on user profile updates. MSPs must scan through users to check which applies to the OneDrive site and make changes accordingly. This entails running scheduled jobs and periodically checking their status to perform customizations.
- Configuring Microsoft 365 suite-level settings. Microsoft 365 offers built-in customization features for OneDrive, which MSPs can find in the site suite bar. Applying changes via the suite bar will take some time.
- Using a hidden app part with user context. This method uses a centralized landing page as a starting point for customization. MSPs must ensure one centralized location, such as a company intranet homepage.
MSPs must assess these factors to determine the best solution.
Ensuring Data Protection and Compliance
Data protection and compliance are crucial for OneDrive. MSPs must enable robust data security and compliance strategies to ensure every business benefits from high-level security.
Many organizations must protect high volumes of sensitive information, and MSPs must consider this. OneDrive has many built-in features that MSPs must use to maintain security.
These features include:
- Privacy: All OneDrive applications follow strict privacy policies to prevent data breaches.
- Security: OneDrive integrates with all Microsoft 365 security capabilities, including user-based access, app and identity management, and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
- GDPR Compliance: Microsoft OneDrive adheres to GDPR requirements.
- Data Residency: This component refers to the location where data is stored at rest. All data within OneDrive is stored within the customer tenant and follows strict Microsoft 365 guidelines for data storage by geography.
- Compliance: Microsoft provides comprehensive solutions to ensure businesses comply with regional, national, and industry-specific requirements.
With Reveille’s proactive monitoring, MSPs can maintain and monitor compliance in real-time. Our automated system delivers the necessary metrics for regulated systems and automatically notifies audit teams, security, and the application when a metric or threshold is crossed.
Enhancing Client Collaboration through OneDrive
Collaborating through OneDrive is imperative to support remote and efficient communication and feedback between departments. MSPs can share files and folders and determine which users can access these documents.
They can also disable or adjust sharing capabilities at any time. Although OneDrive doesn’t offer robust collaboration capabilities – unlike a platform like SharePoint or OnBase – it does cover all the features users need for quick and easy sharing. These functions include:
- Users can create files and folders and share them with external and internal teams
- Users can leave comments and make revisions to the same document
- Multiple users can edit files and leave in-line comments in real-time
- Any user with permission can remove or restore documents from the recycle bin
With various users accessing documents, MSPs must ensure that all projects saved in OneDrive are secure. Reveille’s content security will give MSPs the metrics to track content security and prevent data breaches.
Proactive Monitoring and Automation
Automation and real-time monitoring are vital for MSPs managing OneDrive sites. Reveille provides all the functions enterprises need to ensure the continual performance of OneDrive.
Reveille will maintain Microsoft 365 environments as an agentless monitoring platform with minimal manual intervention. We provide insights into over 30 dashboard metrics, revealing Microsoft OneDrive:
- User activity
- Server performance
- Site performance
- Data security
With Reveille, MSPs can gain complete visibility and control over Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive environments to detect and avoid red-level issues before they evolve and clients are impacts. Reveille deploys automated remediation solutions to report and solve performance issues. These solutions include:
- Disable user access that contains a repository content access breach
- Restart or cycle a failed ECM process
- Relaunch an ECM application or API gateway
- Invoke a remediation action for a remote system or service
Reveille generates automated reports identifying which problems occurred in the ECM environment and which remediation technique was deployed to solve them.
Manage OneDrive with Reveille
OneDrive is a strategic tool for helping enterprises manage documents, user access, content security, and collaboration at the user level. MSPs must take a strategic approach to installing, configuring, customizing, and automating OneDrive monitoring/management, prioritize data protection and enhance client collaboration to simplify document management.
With Reveille’s agentless monitoring, MSPs can gain complete visibility into OneDrive performance. Our platform allows an MSP to monitor OneDrive in real-time and automate content security, remediation, and compliance.
Ready to get Reveille for OneDrive? Contact Reveille for a demo today.