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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits).

You could make the argument that cloud solutions are not a prerequisite for collaborative tools like Office 365 or Google Docs, but desktop peer-to-peer systems like those that Groove Networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks) tried to create did not take off.

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Hmmm. Compared to Google Docs and Google Drive, Microsoft's collaboration is just bizarre.

Yes, under ideal conditions, teams of people technically could use Microsoft to edit and review documents online at the same time. I have yet to see it in a real world setting. Often times, where I work, we just get confused by OneDrive's links vs direct sharing vs personal onedrive vs sharepoint onedrive. And we end up sharing multiple copies of the same file on Teams which is another source of confusion.

I don't know what you consider ideal conditions, but we do it all the time. It's pretty common for me to be reviewing a document and see the avatars of other people who are simultaneously reviewing and editing it. I've been doing this for years and have yet to have a problem.

Sharing multiple copies of the "same" file is where the problems come in.

There are multiple issues. [1] If you drag/drop or upload the file to Teams, it creates a copy and shares it via Teams SharePoint?

[2] If you look in Teams, some people have automatic permissions because they are in the Team or already have access to the Teams folder. If they are not in the Team, then you have to give "direct access".

[3] For the paranoid, you first go into OneDrive and "manage access". Then you are faced with two choices whose UX is confusing to say the least. One option is to "Copy Link" which has almost the same identical choices as "Share with Specific People". Note that "Share with Specific People" gives you options like "Anyone/doesn't require sign in" and the dialog has a button called "Copy Link". Huh? I thought I was sharing with specific people. I am still unsure who exactly can see the document. Or if the document was shared externally outside of my company.

SHAREPOINT https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-sharepoint-...

ONEDRIVE https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-onedrive-fi...

Below are snippets of MSFT's documentation of what happens when you upload a file to a Teams channel. I BOLDED the confusing parts and added ???.

> All files that you upload, create, or share in Teams can be found in the ONEDRIVE??? icon app on the left side of Teams for desktop.

> Files that you upload to a channel are stored in your team's SHAREPOINT???folder. These files are available in the Files tab at the top of each channel.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/file-storage-in-m...

With Teams, the distinction is pretty easy: Within a Team, the file gets uploaded to the Team's SharePoint site. If you share a file in the Chat module, it gets uploaded to your own OneDrive.

It's clear as in "if you know the rule you can count on it" but there is no discoverability within the tool itself. It will even say if a file has been uploaded into the chat already, giving you an impression that the file is in the chat - while it really is in your own onedrive.

I only discovered it by chance while roaming my onedrive directory.

On top of that, Onedrive is the worst of the lot at handling collisions in files. I routinely find that files I work on using two machines in my office (gbit uplink) get garbled. To the point where neither has the latest changes, they’re just gone. Absolutely terrible.

Confusing to the points where I had (university) students that told me "I _only_ have the file in Excel [and therefore can not share it with you]". That statement confused me until I left academia and was forced to work with MS Office for the first time. Having files in 4 different locations really does not help.

Groove worked amazing until MS bought them out and basically killed them. I've only used it when it was included in Office, but it worked amazingly well. As long as you had at least 1 computer on, it synced pretty reliably. It even worked for Outlook when they were independent but ironical Outlook sync was disabled when they integrated Groove into Office. The next batch of syncing systems were a terrible mess. I think it turned into Sharepoint sync, then decided to go full internet cloud and decided to replace it Foldershare (they bought them about same time they bought Groove), updated it to Livemesh, and killed all that off finalizing with Skydrive which had to be changed to Onedrive. I loved Groove and tried all the iterations but found Dropbox to be hands down the best and have over 30GB free. Unfortunately they only offer 3 free devices now so I might have to go back to Onedrive which had a lot of sync issues last i tried it.

Google's collaberative is probably miles ahead. it's been awhile, I've not used it since I was paying for Japanese lessons.

Collaborative editing in OneNote is hot garbage, leaving you with a mile long list of conflicts. It desperately needs some work.

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