One Drive Best Practices

Now that Horizon is using OneDrive within Office365, the following best practices need to be communicated to all staff that have access to OneDrive. The following best practices have been compiled from the most common requests for help from staff. The items below will reduce frustration and confusion, especially for new staff not familiar with Office365:

Make sure that you are indeed signed into OneDrive. If the OneDrive icon (BlueCloud) in the bottom right corner, has a red X then you are not signed in and OneDrive will not be accessible
The different coloured icons for files inside OneDrive do matter, a green circle check mark means the file is in sync and the copy on your workstation is identical to what is saved in the OneDrive cloud. A blue circular arrow means that OneDrive knows about changes and edits to the local file, and is in the process of saving those changes to the cloud copy. Red X's mean that there is a conflict and these should not be ignored, resolve the conflict by choosing which file has the latest data or merge both into a new copy
OneDrive has a file path limit of 400 characters. If your file is located under dozens of sub-folders, all with long names, OneDrive will not sync files that have a full path of longer than 400 characters. You will need to restructure your files with fewer sub-folders or to shorten the names of existing sub-folders
Avoid saving (or dragging and dropping) emails into OneDrive where the email has a very long subject line - we have 7 year retention on any email, even ones that are deleted so it is not necessary to move email into OneDrive for archival purposes
Avoid making special or complex permissions within many sub-folders, the best practice is to keep read and write permissions simple otherwise other staff may not be able to access files that they need to. If you have a sensitive file that is located in a permissive folder, it may need to be moved to a less permissive folder, rather than changing the existing permissions
Files inside of OneDrive cannot be explicitly shared with individuals outside of Horizon using the "Share" button - the only exception is special very limited cases for Marketing
Files inside of OneDrive can be edited by different Horizon staff at the same time and synced normally as long as the option to allow Office applications to sync those changes is check marked from the Settings cog on the OneDrive blue cloud icon
Some departments at Horizon have many 100,000's of files stored in OneDrive, it is not necessary to be able to access all of them, try and limit your shortcut icons (with the blue chain link) to folders you must use on a daily basis
While OneDrive does work with large numbers of files, it may need a moment or two to catch up to changes you are making to files - it will never sync changes instantly and there will always be a short delay for the data to be copied to the file in the cloud. Also remember that you are one user within Horizon and Horizon is one Office365 customer among millions globally so it is important to give OneDrive a chance to catch up to all your edits and changes
OneDrive automatically keeps historical revisions of files so if you accidentally make edits that were incorrect, you can revert back to a previous version of the file
OneDrive has a recycle bin so if a file is accidentally deleted, it can be recovered within 90 days. Horizon also has separate daily backups of OneDrive where we can do a mass restore in case an entire folder or a large number of files are accidentally deleted
If OneDrive needs a gentle push to sync file changes, you can right click on the blue cloud icon in the bottom right corner of your screen and choose Quit from the Settings cog. To re-open OneDrive, it can be found by opening your Start menu, clicking on OneDrive and signing in if prompted. This will get OneDrive to check all of the files you have short cuts to and to sync any changes found.