There is a nice overview on the SharePoint Team blog although it does escape from mentioning limitations such as max number of files and column lookup limitations.
One thing I have noticed is that as we’ve rolled out SharePoint 2013, users who click “Sync” who don’t have Office 2013 get a very unintuitive error. You do need Office 2013 to use SkyDrive Pro and sync’ing capability in SharePoint 2013. You can get a patch for SharePoint Workspace which is part of Office 2010 to make it work with SharePoint 2013.
I have been using SharePoint 2013 internally at AvePoint now for a month or so for our MySites and had no problems whatsoever. But this morning noticed that my SkyDrive Pro files had a little icon next to them.
In the Windows Start Bar tray, I right clicked on the SkyDrive Pro icon and selected “View Sync Problems” and got this window:
The frustrating part is there is no “Resolve” button here…as much as I hated SharePoint Workspace, at least the sync issues could be resolved.
I found a post on the Office 365 community forums that had ALL sorts of recommendations around:
- the Document Library being too large and being unsupported
- the “Offline client availability” not being enabled
- try and sync another Document Library
- try it on another machine
- Repair Office 2013
If it is the case that my document library is too large…it would be great that SkyDrive Pro actually suggested this…rather than show me “An error occurred while attempting to synchronize this tool.”. The limits are 20,000 items in your “SkyDrive Pro” Document library, and 5,000 items in any other Document Library you sync. Unfortunately I can’t find the reference on technet but it is on the SPC12 slides.
I created a new Document Library in my My Site by going up to cog icon and selecting Site Contents, which wasn’t in quick launch when I am on “SkyDrive” page. Then I had to click “add an App” and select Document Library. A note here…the whole “SkyDrive” page vs MySite and App paradigm for library will drive users nuts and is completely unintuitive. Good news is it sync’d the new Document Library fine. The worse news was that it doesn’t add this new Document Library that is synced under the “SkyDrive Pro” icon in Windows Explorer, but to a new Icon called “SharePoint”.
The whole “SkyDrive Pro” concept is really confusing, from the Windows Explorer screenshot you can see I have “SharePoint”, “SkyDrive Pro” and “SkyDrive” now. Also in the SharePoint 2013 top bar “SkyDrive Pro” is called “SkyDrive”.
When you click on “SkyDrive” the page says “SkyDrive Pro” but notice in the quick launch below photo it says “My Documents” and in the title heading it says “Documents”. The consistency of the user interface is very poor.
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in the meetings when this was agreed. The team also followed it up with a what’s the differences between SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro post to try and defend their decision. I’m hoping there will be some updates to fix some of these inconsistencies shortly….
I feel your pain. For my part I’ve been dealing with random but regular sync errors, which I most often resolve (work around) by simply stopping sync on the affected libraries, removing the local folders (to avoid naming conflicts upon re-establishing sync) then finally re-establishing sync. Note that I’m actually syncing SP2010 to SkyDrive Pro. When it works it works great and more seamlessly than Workspace 2010, but as I said I’ve been dealing with these regular sync errors too.
Oh and I notice that after the very recently-released MS update for “SharePoint Workspace 2013″ (note the new name
) I now get the marginally more useful Error 0×80040209 (already Googled it without much luck or relevance).
Brian
Twitter: @brianlala
Great advice, I\’m hoping the latest update will address most of these.
We have also been seeing additional confusion around Governance for IT. Since SkyDrive is PERSONAL – It means IT has to encourage/advise users not to save corporate data/content there, but users are confused by the terming and as a result IT messaging is confusing.
In addition to this multiple IT groups have asked if they could search more than just SkyDrive Pro content, but also SkyDrive personal content (which can’t be searched). Which leads to user confusion – how come it can search my ‘personal docs’ on the P drive, but not the ones in SkyDrive?
Lastly imagine a scenario where you have o365 social profiles and a o365 personal site (we can’t disable them), and then on prem we have a personal site… that means 2 SkyDrive Pro locations.
I don’t want to be negative – and I think there is a lot of opportunity here – but it’s definitely an area that most people aren’t ready for or expecting challenges.
I too have been having lots of issues with sync errors using SkyDrive pro. Like Brian does, I have been having to stop syncing particular libraries, deleting the local folder then re-syncing the library but frankly its a complete pain having to do this. I think its caused partly by connectivity issues to sharepoint.com because I have no such issues with SkyDrive which seems to work far more reliably than SkyDrive Pro does. Its very annoying to see the Pro taskbar icon locked into a “processing Changes” mode though and I wish MS would look at the issues SDP has and sort them out.
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