No Stupid Questions

It. Is. The. Worst.

Someone shares a file directly, another shares the whole folder, someone else makes a Team, which automatically creates its own sharepoint site that has its own document library. Now someone else shares a file via a Community sharepoint site they have, which is somehow different than a Teams site. The Community site also has its own document library.

Oh and sharepoint is also onedrive? But also isn’t, somehow. I never know. I can sync some stuff to one onedrive folder, and some to another onedrive folder. But it’s all also the same.

To answer your question, you are not alone.

Your boss did this not the best way*. They should have created a SharePoint site, maybe a few extra document libraries within that site, and have the files in there. Then added people as members to the site, maybe lock down a few of the document libraries/folders as required to specific people.

Then for ease of use people can open the libraries and click the sync button. Although if you have too many it'll slow down/break.

OneDrive/SharePoint is not a drop in replacement for a file server, and those honestly still find their use, but a lot of places with a bit of re-structuring can work just as well if not better through SharePoint . Especially if they put in the effort to start using other SharePoint features.

The problem is that your files are in OneDrive instead of SharePoint. OneDrive is for personal files that you occasionally want to collab with others on. SharePoint is for collaborative files that you occasionally want to restrict.

One is meant to be closed most of the time, the other open most of the time. And the way sharing and other features work within the tends to reflect that charactistic.

Your team files need to be in a SharePoint library. It is possible to have a direct link in the file explorer to the SharePoint files and run everything as if it is a local file server. MS is seemingly trying to move away from that and keeping the browser open to the document library has mostly the same functionality with some minorly different steps.

But it sounds to me like your IT dept doesn't have enough experience with M365 to know how to handle this properly.

Yeah. 100% missing it. Having owners as well as the ability to set labels and restrictions is an incredibly important part of keeping data sensitive.

Get them in explorer following https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/view-sharepoint-files-in-file-explorer-66b574bb-08b4-46b6-a6a0-435fd98194cc

Wait until Corporate sees the new data storage rates for 365 for next year and their potential new bill for cloud storage.

They'll be spinning up those server room file servers in no time.

Working in IT, I understand the frustration.

There's a couple ways to do it, but you can add SharePoint to your OneDrive on your PC, it shows up basically the same as any of your OneDrive files in Explorer.

Apparently there's a way to map it to a drive letter as well, but it gets complex pretty quickly and as far as I know, you need to get the link to paste into the mapped drive dialog from the object owner... I might be wrong here.

Google it. You'll improve your life so much.

This seems so wrong to me. Am I just not "getting" it??

You are right. It is all chicken shit.

If you still use the desktop versions of MS Office, you can use the 'favorites' feature inside each program, for some files at least, to avoid the ugly URLs

Or, what I even prefer, 'pin' some files to your task bar.

I'm not going to pretend that it works great but it sounds to me like you need to know how it works a little better

You're perfectly right. But those who decide, sales or decision makes, don't understand that. So it's easy to sell them some shitty thing and empty promises. They trust another salesman a lot more than their own tech guys anyway.

I'm sure everyone working in office 365 has this problem to some degree. My (pessimistic) guess is that Microsoft is aware of these problems and in stead of solving them in SharePoint itself, they create more programs to help organising. Like now you can find your files through Bing connected to your workspace (which is just to try and get people to use bing?). There is also delve and such that shows you what you last worked on regardless of its location. And soon we will have the AI co-pilot, which I'm expecting will make things even worse since it will grab anything you have access to and not bother with original context. I don't know what the endgame is here, maybe make people and companies dependent on these kinds of programs?

In SharePoint: Add shortcut to OneDrive In OneDrive: tell it if, or how, to save the folders locally.

Use File Explorer, like I think you'd prefer.

It does not work perfectly.

Using MS Teams for class is the worst... I do not know most of the time where the files in those assignments' turn-in will end up.

You can add a second OneDrive to your local folders. Right click the little cloud icon, navigate to your account details and add an account from there.

I added my orgs Sharepoint so that I could see everything locally without all the palaver.

We use SharePoint and everything just shows up on my desktop computer as a drive like it always did before when it was on a local server. Works really well.

Considering my personal onedrive wants to share everything I share with write permissions to the general public I've had a different experiance. But I certainly understand your point.

How do I get it from the browser into a normal folder view?

There's a setting which the sharepoint admins can set which allows Windows Explorer view.

To access https://sharepoint.company.com/team_a what you'll do is open windows Explorer and navigate to "\\sharepoint.company.com\team_a" (starts with double back slash, without the quotes)... You can even map it as a network drive on your system, so you can have an X: drive which maps to that same location and you can use it like a normal shared drive...

Edit: I take back my comment. This method doesn't work anymore, except for pre-SharePoint 2019 on-prem environments...