I have Microsoft OneDrive for Business, as part of a corporate Office265 account that my company has. I figured this worked like DropBox, where there is a local folder on my machine that is synced across local replicas on my other machines. It is also available on a web interface.
I just put a bunch of files in there, and when I opened one in Word, Word tells me that I am opening a file from a network location. Why? Should I care? When I save it tells me it will merge changes with other users’ changes (but of course no other users have access to it). File reads and writes seem to be slower than before. But it’s on my local disk. This does not happen with DropBox.
I was hoping this was going to be really simple, but as usual Microsoft has introduced some confusion and in searching Microsoft’s many pages describing this service, I cannot find a description of this particular point.
makes me think that OneDrive is intended to regard itself as being on a network. It also clarifies the “When I save it tells me it will merge changes with other users’ changes”.
There is a local hard drive folder. Which is where you’re reading from / saving to. The onedrive app runs in the background to sync those local changes with the server.
The fundamental distinction about a network location for opening is security awareness. A doc you create & maintain locally is less risky than one you get over the wire from somebody else. Once you put a doc online and enable others to edit it, it’s no longer pristinely yours. Somebody could have put evil content into it while you weren’t watching. So the doc becomes less trustworthy.
Fundamentally, OneDrive for business is about more than just you having cloud storage for sharing / syncing docs between various devices used only by you. It’s for sharing / syncing docs between multiple devices used by multiple people. So to simplify the use cases, they treat all docs in the cloud as networked docs. The fact it is sharable means they chose to treat it as shared.