Mac Solution for OneDrive For Business

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I was recently involved in a discussion about the capabilities of OneDrive for Business for Mac, with my co-worker, Michael Toole. One of his customers was in the process of migrating network shares over to SharePoint. Majority of their user base was on Mac, and had very little experience with the web UI’s, so OneDrive sounded like a default choice for syncing their files to local machine.
In this post, I share our experience and findings for a quick and easy way to address the sync problems on Mac (I’ll share the credit for this post with Michael).
Currently OneDrive for Business does not have a sync client for Mac. It’s on the roadmap for later this year or early 2015 although expect it to be released with limited functionality such as only personal site sync (no team site). In the meantime there are few third party apps which does the same. There is an app currently available in the iTunes app store but only works if you have a SharePoint Online or qualifying Office 365 business subscription. Else, look at using Microsoft Document Connection for Mac.

This allows you to connect the libraries to your Mac in a very similar way as the windows explorer view on Windows. Although document connection does not support offline access.

To get around that limitation, download files to the local device. When the Mac OS is offline, you’ll be able to make any changes using the local Office applications. Once the Mac has a network connection, saving the updated documents to the Document Connection is available. It’ll also respect your check in and check out (read as exclusive check out). So, check out your document while you are online. Make changes while offline, and then check in back to the library when connected. Items also cannot be saved directly to OneDrive for Business through Document Connection. Newly created files on the Mac need to be stored locally and then uploaded to the system.
Spread out your files across multiple document libraries instead of folders in the same location. OneDrive for Business does not allow specific folder sync, but do allow sync across multiple libraries. In short try to go for flat structure across multiple libraries rather than the traditional folder structure.
It’s not the most convenient way when compared to windows, but might be the best way until the public beta for OneDrive for Mac releases next year.