Microsoft OneDrive for Business... For Mac Now (Not Later)

In October 2013, Microsoft announced the donation of Office 365 to non-profits including Churches. 
While weighing the pros and cons of moving to O365, we were interested in considering SkyDrive Pro as a suitable replacement for Dropbox and Google Drive that were running on many staff computers on the network. 

It was a huge bummer when we learned that SkyDrive Pro was not available for Macs.  Our environment is about 50 Macs and 50 PC's so there was no way that we would transition from Dropbox to SDP until it would be available on a mac. 

Though we didn't roll out SDP to the staff, staff began finding out that this cloud storage was available and dropping documents into their SDP folder.  Mac users were able to manipulate documents online, but this limitation hindered many of our staff's workflow involve the actual file being present on the workstation. 

The Solution (Now OneDrive)
So, since Microsoft hasn't come out with OneDrive for Business on the Mac, we found that you could house the OneDrive folder inside of your Dropbox Folder on a PC.  Whatever changes are made inside the OneDrive folder will be replicated to the Dropbox folder on the Mac. 

So far it's worked great.  Files edited on our Macs and saved in the ...Dropbox>OneDrive folder would sync through a constantly running PC or server and make the documents available on Office 365. 

Microsoft has announced that OneDrive for Business for the Mac will be available later this year, so we don't plan on deploying it to all users.  But in the meantime, several Mac users will benefit from being able to open, create and edit documents on their Macs and have those documents be available on their cloud & iPads through Office365. 

Blessings,
Ryan
Westside Family Church IT Director