Office 365 | Focus on OneDrive (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to our webinar. My name is Ziad Paracha and I am the account executive at Encore Business Solutions. Welcome to our continuing series for the Office Hours webinar. Today’s topic, we will be discussing OneDrive for business, and make sure you subscribe to our Office Hours webinar series to learn more amazing things about what Office 365 can offer you and your business.

So, today, we’re going to be really focusing on the great things that OneDrive can do, not only for personal but as well as for business use. So how do we use OneDrive yourself, or how we access it through 365, how we can work with folders and synchronize this stuff to our computer, as well as just kind of utilizing…the day-to-day basis of how we can utilize OneDrive.

So what really is OneDrive? OneDrive is the internet-based storage platform that has significant chunk of space offered free by Microsoft to anyone with a subscription license or a Microsoft account. And that storage actually comes to about one terabyte of cloud storage available and provides file hosting services that allow your files to synchronize from your computer and to other mobile devices as well. And, of course, the cloud storage allows you to access all those services from anywhere on a cross-platform type experience where the graphic is very similar on all sorts of devices.

So OneDrive is basically Microsoft’s version of the cloud storage. And like I mentioned, it’s included in your Office 365 license packages. But basically, what Microsoft has kind of done is to create this toolkit that includes SharePoint and OneDrive along with other applications that kind of are designed to make your experience and your business needs work effectively. So Teams is one of them. We’ve had webinars on that as well. So if you missed out on the training on Teams, feel free to visit the website for more of those webinars.

Again, all of these platforms come together into really creating a cohesive environment for your businesses to work. SharePoint and OneDrive on that play a specific role in Office 365 because it really connects the workplace with intelligent content management capabilities where today, we’re seeing significant benefit for businesses where they can hear and work together inside and outside of your organization and access that content seamlessly from anywhere and have that collaborative experience. You can also kind of transform the processes by automating some of the repetitive tasks that are there and creating workflows to kind of streamline that process as well within OneDrive and SharePoint.

You can engage with and connect with the resources that are needed in your teams to get the work done and to kind of create that open conversation that harnesses collective knowledge and makes it easier for your employees and workers to find the information when they need it, and essentially doing all of that with the confidence that all of your data is protected and managed. That’s kind of the essence of Microsoft 365. Just a couple of stats to let you know how large OneDrive has actually become. Eighty-five percent of the fortune 500 companies actually have SharePoint and OneDrive in their Office 365 and utilize it. We’ve noticed over the years, 65% of all the seats that are there have actually gone online, which is great to kind of see how the cloud adoption and that digital transformation is really becoming something that most companies are now becoming on. Ninety percent of the growth in active users, so we’ve seen more than hundreds and thousands of organizations actually go into this cloud and then carry on that momentum moving forward.

So OneDrive with Office 365, 4 key components here that we’ll discuss and actually show you in the demo as well. One is to access your files from anywhere. That’s really important because you can do it on any device, your Mac, your PCs, even a web browser. You can share and collaborate with people inside and outside of your organization. We don’t really work individually anymore. There’s a lot of teams that are being developed. There’s a lot of people that have to share that information and content and to be able to do that with security and via, for example, having email verification or identity verification to kind of manage that in your admin center. Office 365 allows you to do that and then co-authoring capabilities and all the other abilities that I’d rather show you on a demo because it’s much cooler.

These are some of the actually new features that have been added just this year. And so there’s hundreds of them out there, and just to kind of keep that in mind that Microsoft is allowing users to kind of give their feedback and to incorporate other kinds of capabilities within OneDrive to help you kind of have the best experience in the workforce. So the first pillar of OneDrive, to access files from anywhere on all your devices.

Now, the really cool feature that I wanna really point out here is that you can…end users can actually preview over 270 different file types, including like Adobe 3D, all these different types of versions, without actually having to install those applications on their device. So, more and more viewing capabilities are added on a daily basis for OneDrive. And you can access that stuff without having the platform actually installed or that application actually installed on your device.

So even if that’s Word, for instance, you have the online version of Word that you can work with rather than actually having Word on your computer to begin with and to be able to view and edit and comment and basically get work done without relying on someone else to having that. I wanna discuss files on-demand, which I’ll also show you in one of the Windows, 10 capabilities that are there for OneDrive where you can actually clear some of the storage as well as have some of the content on your device when you need it. So, you can actually keep it on your device and have it from the cloud directly, or you can keep it on the cloud and be able to use it. I’ll explain that to you little more in our demo as well. Share inside or outside your organization. So it’s easy to email files, transfer files, send it directly through PDF formats or editable formats as well. You can have a real time experience using OneDrive that you can’t really have on Office desktop, the web apps, as well as on your device on any other sort of storage services that are out there like Dropbox or even Google Drive. So that’s kind of really cool to know.

Collaborate with Office integration. So, again, you can have a seamless and consistent collaboration mechanism where you can co-author in real time. You can have all sorts of different web applications that are there. So you can work using the Office applications within the Office OneDrive. And, of course, you can quickly find files that matter the most to you, which means you can leverage all of the tools that Microsoft has like Microsoft Graph and store your files on OneDrive. And you can pin them. You can see what your recent files are. There’s a whole bunch of different…basically reduces the amount of clicks that you have to get to where you need to be. That’s really important because you wanna make it the most effective and efficient experience in your work environment.

Of course, everything that Microsoft has, that’s right, billions of dollars a year are literally on trying to protect your data. The Office licenses that you use with your small and medium-sized businesses are used with large corporations as well as Microsoft itself. All the files are encrypted at rest in transit. You have to make sure…or OneDrive makes sure that your security of your data is actually secure, and it’s critical that it is.

There are many other capabilities that kind of lets you know whether or not there is some… It helps you with your ransomware attack, so you can make sure your files are actually…on your OneDrive, you have the latest versions there. So even if there are ransomware attacks or anything like that, your content is not lost or corrupted. Keeping your data safe. Again, there are self-recovery of information. For example, you delete your file or anything happens, there is…it lasts 30 days and you don’t lose that kind of content that you had worked so hard to kind of get. There’s no interruption in your workflow as well.

Of course, I did mention about this already. You can have protections and manage the people who are involved or who are working on those files. You can have different kind of restrictions. You can grant access or you can deny access as well, depending on who you want to allow to be able to work or share those files. You can block it from actually being uploaded, as well, and a whole bunch of different capabilities that you have to protect the files in your storage space. So let’s kind of move our way into the demo here, so I can actually show you how things look in OneDrive. Now, I’m gonna show you the online version of the desktop as well. Give me one second. It seems to want me to authenticate.

While you wait, I’d offer you guys some coffee and donuts, but this is a webinar.

Anyway, while we wait for the actual demo environment to load, for some reason, I will actually show you that on my personal OneDrive. So as you can see the whole experience, you can actually get that from the portal online right away. OneDrive is one of those applications that are included along with the other applications that are in that portal. So if you click OneDrive right here, it pops into a new window showing you where OneDrive can actually have all the files there as well. So just to kind of show you what it looks like here. On the left side, you’ve got files. These are all your files and documents that are saved within OneDrive, different folders that I had created as well. And I’ll show you how to create new folders in here as well.

Some of the recent files that I had probably worked on as well would open up here as well. So anything that I can kind of open and work through here gives you all of the access, timings that I’ve done that with, and what I did on that content. And there is a version history that kind of sticks around as well. Similarly, if I… You know what, let’s get rid of that. If I was to go into Share, I can actually see what has been shared with me as well as what I have shared by me, what I have shared with other people as well. So you can kind of access that information anywhere here and see who shared what and what that activity has been since that time as well.

Discover is a really cool process here as well where you can actually have other templates and stuff that is there for the rest of your team as well and all of the relevant items that are to you will be kind populated here as well. The recycling bin, I think we all know what that does, it just kind of disposes of items that are there. And as you can see, you can have files from here from quite some time that are deleted by or created by, you can have a whole bunch of filters within there and also be able to recover or restore those files as well when you need to. So let’s go back into this file section for now. And, of course, everything is searchable with the Search tab here. You can just search a particular file and you will have that kind of files populate up here, as well as, if you search, press Enter into the main file here as well.

This tab here on the top left here, the new folder, you can actually create folders as well as access the applications, like I mentioned, from within your OneDrive. So if I was to create a new folder here…let’s just call it OneDrive. And if I was to create it, it would populate right here and it’ll tell you that it was modified or worked at right from the screen in front of you. You can share that folder from here. So let’s say if I wanted to share that with some of my team, and I’m just going to share that with Melissa, and she will not know why I’m sending this to her, but here you go, Melissa, you can now access all the files that are in that folder, and that link has now been sent. Now, if you noticed here, I can also send that in my email or just copy and paste that link into another platform that needs to be done or within through there through my work email.

What else I could have done here was I could have changed the settings so that not only the people in Encore Business Solutions can view this, or I can have it so that anyone can view that information or restrict access to just people with the access or have actual specific people that have that. I can give them editing capability or not. And all that restrictions are here as well while you are sharing that folder right from the beginning. So that was to go into that folder. Now, I can create, let’s say, a Word document right from within the OneDrive experience. If I open up a Word document, it will open an online application of the document, which has a very similar feel for what the actual install application is as well. Let’s change the title right from over here, and we can call it Webinar Series. And as you can see, it’s saved automatically in real-time. From here, I can also share. That’s a similar kind of a little web page that opens up. I can make comments on the side. All sorts of capabilities from OneDrive are…from Word is also in this platform as well.

Now, let’s say I don’t wanna be here anymore, I can go back to OneDrive just using the hyperlink that’s here. And you will notice that the Word document is actually already uploaded into the document. Everyone who has access to that can view that document. As you can see, I click the OneDrive access, and you can see who has access into this. So I’m the owner of this document or this platform. I can give or grant access to other people as well right through this. So I can just give them an email address or a search name within my company, give them either just viewing capabilities or that they can actually edit the file. And, of course, you can notify people by adding some messages and then actually grant the access rights from here, and which will kind of give them the ability to actually own or work or view those documents as well.

I can also upload other documents from files and folders from my hard drive. So let’s say if I just wanted to create any sort of event. So let’s say if I open that…this will say that it’s uploading. There’s a whole…it’s showing me that it’s now uploaded to the drive. And here you go. I’ve got the image that I had opened up uploaded here already. And I can do that with anywhere else. I can also share through here. So there’s a lot of sharing capabilities. I can also download, especially because I’m the owner of this. But if I’ve access to download, I can download the files or the folder itself onto my hard drive as well. You can create flows as well and kind of manage your flows all through here. I haven’t created any, so I wouldn’t be able to show you. You can synchronize one drive to your computer. So I’m not gonna do that because sometimes it takes a little bit of time, but basically it’s figuring out what files need to be synced either from your desktop to your cloud as well. There’s multiple different ways that you can actually do that.

One of the cool things I wanna show you is that there’s actually OneDrive right over here. So it’s on your folder explorer. If you go into your file explorer, the OneDrive is actually right here. I can see all of the files that are here, are already uploaded. So if I go back into my files, a portion of things in my OneDrive, you will see all of the files that are over here are already on my [inaudible 00:17:15] so I don’t have to go into my online cloud browser or I don’t have to come here. So it’s in both places. The status of these are basically the file on demand, features which are really, really cool. So if you notice the different kind of icons that are showing here. The cloud icon is obviously saying that this folder is on the cloud. So this is one that I just created OneDrive. And as you can see, it’s already synchronized between both of my…on my OneDrive.

Then there is this icon with a green check mark but without the…with a white background. This one and as well as there’s one with a green background with a white check mark. Now, I can change these statuses, and I’ll tell you what these mean. But basically, let’s go with this one. And I will right-click that and let’s say, free up space. Now, as soon as I free up space, that’s synchronizing and now that is accessible on the cloud. And I can access this with or without having internet. Now, let’s say if I’m traveling or I’m going somewhere where…let’s say I’m on an aircraft and I’m traveling somewhere and I need to have some files with me that I always want to keep on my device, and I don’t wanna pay for the internet that’s provided on the airplanes, all I have to do is say be able to have always keep this on device. And you’ll notice they’ll synchronize, so having the green on. That way I can access without having internet. And it’ll always be on my device.

Now, let’s say you wanna free up some of the storage that’s there. You don’t need this or you’re done with it. You’ve landed and now you’ve got internet and you don’t need this file anymore. All you gotta do is click free up space and that will go there, or you can just have a view online and that will actually show you the document that’s coming online or wait for that to load up, or you can share that directly through here and put it all back on the cloud as well, so a whole bunch of different things that you can do to kind of utilize file on-demand capabilities that this has as well. You can see these are only on the cloud. I can’t free up space anymore but actually bring those files back into my drive here as well, so cool features here.

Now, what if I wanted to upload some files without actually having to go to upload. You can actually just drag and drop. So if I was to just drag and drop something, I showed you guys that earlier, you can just drag it and drop it. You can also drop it onto a particular folder. So right now I’m just…it’s still uploading, but it just came into my main kind of homepage. Let’s drag that back into…or let’s move that file, move that into another folder. Let’s say I wanna move that into the OneDrive folder that I had created or another destination, so your OneDrive. And then you can go into your OneDrive folder, and you can simply move that there and that file will actually move right within here. So a lot of those capabilities are all present here where you can do…

What if I’m working on, let’s say, Excel and I wanna share from Excel to OneDrive. So let’s just write some things that we know we’re doing, something on Excel. You can go into file, Save As. And as you notice, you can actually have your work OneDrive or your personal OneDrive. I don’t have my personal one here but my work OneDrive and save it to any of those folders, again, that are present. So if I wanted to save it again to that OneDrive, I don’t have an Excel file there, and I can put a title on there and actually save into the different formats and click Save. And it tells you that you know what? It’s been saved. The title is saving. And if I go back on to my OneDrive, it will pop up right up in here. Now, from here, I can share with other people. I can store it. I can play with it from here. You will actually have the online version, again, open up, and you can see all the work that I have done and edited here. And it will also be saved and reflect on your file explorer as well, so it will be saved in this format.

Now, from here as well, of course, you can do other things as well. You can share it from here because it’s already being shared through this file. So you don’t actually have to open OneDrive every time, or you can just work in OneDrive and not have to come into any of these Excel programs as well. I close it. Everything’s already been saved. Now, you can also see the version histories of particular files as well. So you can look at who’s kind of edited it and what the history is. So you can see over here, it says, it’s just me editing right now. I haven’t shared it with anyone. That’s why you can’t see the history. But right from here, you can see who’s worked on it and have the entire list of…like an audit trail almost of the people that have worked on it, and what they were doing on that as well. It will tell you who’s working and where.

Sometimes, you can even change the settings so that the recipients actually have to have a Microsoft account to be able to edit or not, or they don’t have to have an account to sign in. And all those settings can be changed back and forth to basically give you the control, and you can maintain that control over the data sharing and usage that’s there. When you are syncing, just one note to have, when you’re saving documents and you’re trying to synchronize a folder…well, you can’t. You can’t have special characters like your percent signs or dollar signs while you are saving. Like I will actually… It will not allow you to sync the files properly. So you can have it within the document, but just don’t save your files in that way because it kind of sometimes brings some errors, just some of the concerns that have come up before as well. And that is most of the features that are within OneDrive. And what you can do with it, again, I can open it in multiple different things. I can copy it. And here is the version history. I can see what…I was the only one that edited that particular file in the folder.

Now, there’s a lot of people that come to me and say, “Hey, I don’t need OneDrive or I already have Teams. I’m already utilizing Teams. I don’t really need OneDrive or any other kind of platform.” What we really have to understand here is that though both of the applications umbrella out of SharePoint, OneDrive actually serves a different purpose than Teams would serve. To understand that, your Team application is really great for collaboration with a lot of people and a lot of teams and a lot of projects like that. And if you wanna learn more, like I said, there’s previous webinars that we’ve created. Whereas OneDrive is actually more for your personal file storage. That’s how you should treat it. And it has some components of collaboration and sharing capabilities, but you select a few people that you want to share that with. I’m not gonna share this with a hundred people in my team. I would rather have the Teams application do that and just have all of the people on an existing Team and just share the files and folders over there. This would be great for if you just wanna share something for one or two people or just have that storage for yourself.

So, OneDrive replaces the need for you to have a U drive or an H Drive. Now you can access all of those items via the cloud, and there’s lots of storage available. Like I mentioned, within the Office 365 subscription, you get a ton of OneDrive storage, 1tb of storage. And, of course, if there’s any more details on licensing and how that works, how to get Office 365 licenses, feel free to reach out to me as well. We can help out there as well. That concludes the rest of my webinar. Hopefully, you guys learned and gained a lot from that. Again, here’s my contact information. If there’s anything else that you guys would require, feel free to reach out. Thank you very much.