What is Microsoft OneDrive?
So you run a small medical practice and have heard the benefits of storing your files on the Cloud. No more servers and no more worrying about backups. In your research to move to the Cloud, somewhere along the line you may have been (poorly) advised to use Microsoft OneDrive. Simply drag and drop your company files onto OneDrive and bam! you are on the Cloud!
Stop.
Take note:
- OneDrive is intended for a person’s individual files or, if you prefer, personal files. It is not meant to replace a company file server!
- OneDrive does not negate your need to backup your files!
- OneDrive is not a storage solution for any Medical Practice.
Okay, now you have a few questions, such as: I am using OneDrive and currently having sync issues on all my computers, how can I fix this?
Well you have come to the right place, here is how to fix your OneDrive Sync issues for your Medical Practice:
Introducing Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is intended for Medical Practices, such as yours, to save your files and provide a collaboration solution in the one place.
- Open Microsoft Teams
- Create a Team (think of it as a Department or group of people working on the same process, i.e. Patients, Doctors, Sales, Accounts)
- Create a Channel (think of it as a subfolder of a Team, i.e. Referrals, Scans, Documents)
Okay, time for some hard facts, in order to fix the OneDrive Sync issues and move to Microsoft Teams, all the files you have saved in OneDrive will need to be moved to Teams. Fortunately, this is an easy process. Here is how it is done:
- Open Microsoft Teams, and click on the Channel you created earlier
- Click Sync
- If you open Windows File Explorer, you will now see the Team Channel is listed
- Drag and drop your relevant files into the Synced Channel
It should be mentioned that this is how you can sync your files from Teams to your own computer for easy file access. You can treat the sync’d location as if it was on your computer. Anything you do to the files will also occur on Microsoft Teams. For example, if you delete a file it will also be deleted on Microsoft Teams. With regard to file permissions, you can control this from ‘Member Permissions’ by right-clicking on the Team.
Lastly the files stored in Microsoft Teams are not backed-up! Please see our article on how to backup your files.