Strava Art

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

It’s no secret that I enjoy cycling – and I’m also a bit of a geek. My cycling and my tech come together in various places but Strava is one of the most obvious… I have been known to say “If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen” (of course, that’s in jest – but I do get annoyed if my GPS traces get messed up).

There’s something quite wonderful about maps too. Maybe this is another side of my geekiness but I love looking at a good map. So, what if you could have a map of a ride you’re particularly proud of turned into a piece of art to display on your wall?

As it happens – you can do exactly that. Cyced produce high quality Strava Art for runners and cyclists. So, when Angus from Cyced asked me if I’d like to review their service, I was interested to give it a try.

I settled on the ride I did with my son last year to raise money for his trip to the Kandersteg International Scout Centre and I provided a Strava link (a GPX file would have been another option). Soon afterwards, Angus sent me a PDF proof to review and, a couple of days after I confirmed the edits, the final print arrived.

I was impressed by how well it was wrapped – indeed, I’ve never had an “unboxing experience” quite like this for a piece of artwork: wrapped in tissue paper; sandwiched between sheets of heavy-duty card; all inside a sturdy card envelope. It would be pretty difficult for my postie to accidentally bend this package!

The print itself is really high quality and the simple (Strava-inspired) colours look amazing – greys, whites and orange highlights. The print that Angus created for me is A4 but there are A3 and A2 options too. I’m now considering buying a second print for the “Man Cave” when I have a suitably big ride to be proud of (or maybe with last year’s London Revolution route).

If you’re looking for something a little different for your wall – a piece of art to celebrate a ride, a run, or maybe a present for a runner/cyclist friend or family member, I’d recommending checking out the Strava Art from Cyced. As the website says it’s “worth more than just a kudos”!

Full disclosure: Cyced provided me with an A4 print in exchange for this blog post but that doesn’t influence my review. Everything I’ve written is my true opinion – but it’s nice to have the artwork for my son to keep as a memento of our 70 miles MTBing along the Grand Union Canal towpath last summer!

Working Flexibly…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’m not saying I’ve reached what one of my Directors once referred to as “career peak” but, as middle age firmly sets in, I can say that work is just one of many priorities I have in my life right now. I’ve probably got at least another 20 years at work, but I needed to strike a better balance between paid work, my roles as a Father and husband, and my health.

For the last few months, I’ve been working flexibly. Specifically, in my case, I’ve been working part-time, 4 days a week. Contractually 30 hours but, given that I’m output-driven, it’s probably more like 40-45. It works well for me.

A few months ago I picked up a new podcast that was being auditioned on the WB-40 podcast feed. I listened to Pauline Yau (@PaulineYau) talking about flexible working and her new venture “The Flexible Movement” and found myself thinking “Yes! Yes, I’ve seen that! And I do that!”.

Shortly afterwards, Pauline and I had a chat and the result is Episode 3 of the Flexible Movement podcast:

In the podcast, Pauline and I chat about many things but I mention how I worked with my current employer to achieve a positive outcome. I also talk about a less favourable experience elsewhere – the key difference being that I didn’t know (or follow) the right process.

Flexible working is not just for parents. My generation increasingly finds ourselves squeezed between raising a family and caring for elderly relatives but there are many reasons why people might want to break away from the “nine to five”. In the UK, employees with at least 26 weeks’ service have the right to request flexible working* once a year but employees don’t have to agree to the request. There are specific grounds though and I’m sure every company with an HR department will have a process.

The video below is produced by ACAS, and looks at some of the benefts for employers as well as some practical implications of the right to request flexible working:

And I found the following links really useful when I was requesting the change in my working practices:

“Employees that feel more in control of their work-life balance are better motivated and focused in the workplace”

Working Families, 2016

Hopefully, one day, flexible working will become “normal”. For now, it relies on a supportive culture (something this BBC article touches on). It may take a generation but I really believe one day we’ll look back office workers attending a fixed place of work for set hours on weekdays the way we look back at working for one employer our whole lives today.

*Flexible working is not “working from home on a Friday”, as some might like to think.

Caching OneDrive for Business content when Files On-Demand is enabled

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Not surprisingly, given who I work for, I’m a heavy user of Microsoft technologies. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro, running the latest versions of Windows 10 of Office 365 ProPlus, joined to Azure Active Directory and managed with Intune. I use all of the Office 365 Productivity apps. I AM A MICROSOFT POWER USER!

Enough of the drama! Let’s bring this down a level…

…I’m just a guy, using a laptop, trying to get a job done. It’s a tool.

OneDrive icon

Most of my files are stored in OneDrive for Business. There’s lots more space there than the typical SSD has available and so Microsoft introduced a feature called Files On-Demand, whereby you see the whole list of files but it’s only actually downloaded when you try to access it.

That sounds great, unless you travel a lot and work on trains and other places where network connectivity is less than ideal.

In my case, I have around 50GB of data in OneDrive and 90GB of free space on my Surface’s SSD so I have the potential to cache it all locally. I used to do this by turning off Files On-Demand but the latest build I’m running has disabled that capability for me.

It’s not feasible to touch every file and force it to be cached and I thought about asking my admins to reverse the setting to force the use of Files On-Demand but then I found another way around it…

If I right-click on a OneDrive file or folder in Windows Explorer there’s the option to “Always keep on this device”. [Update: Peter Bryant (@PJBryant) has flagged a method using the command line too – it seems there are new attributes P and U for Files On-Demand]

By applying this to one of the top-level folders in my OneDrive, I was able to force the files to be cached – regardless of whether Files On-Demand is enabled or not. Now, I can access all of the files in that folder (and any subfolders), even when I’m not connected to the Internet.

Defining multiple RADIUS servers for Aruba Wi-Fi

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
Wi-Fi logo (via Pixabay)

I’ve spent some time over the last few months working with a customer who is building a complete greenfield IT infrastructure, in preparation for launching a new business. It’s been a rare privilege to work without piles of technical debt (of course, it’s never completely that simple – there is data to bring across and there are some core systems that will tie back into the parent organisation) but there have been some challenges along the way too.

One of these was when the customer’s network partner asked for a RADIUS server to be added to our identity solution (to support 802.1x based authentication for Wi-Fi clients). In itself, that wasn’t too big an ask – we could use Windows Servers running Microsoft Network Policy Server (NPS), across two Azure regions. Unfortunately, we also needed to provide resilience and the network partner was suggesting that they could only configure one IP address in their HP-Aruba cloud controllers. Azure Load Balancers only work within region and DNS round robin is not exactly smart, so myself and the other Consultants working on the solution were left scratching our heads.

Luckily, for me, having a reasonably large Twitter network meant I could ask for help – and the help came (thanks to @Tim_Siddle and others)!

We were able to take the information about server groups to our networking partner, who advised us that the cloud controllers lacked the server groups capability until recently (it was only a feature on physical controllers) but that it had now been added.

Other people responded to say they had had similar issues in the past, so this might be useful for others who are trying to configure a certificate-based authentication solution for Wi-Fi with Microsoft NPS servers.

Further reading

Enabling RADIUS Server Authentication [Aruba]

Short takes: Canon Selphy ink cassette issues; a new Samsung 4K monitor; tracking down digital copies of Ikea assembly instructions

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A collection of snippets from this week’s life with tech…

Ink cassette/cartridge issues with a Canon Selphy photo printer

My son has a Canon Selphy CP780. It’s been great for printing the odd 6×4″ photo on demand but it recently started playing up, struggling to feed paper and then complaining that its ink cassette needed to be tightened. I couldn’t remove the cassette (it was stuck) – but this YouTube video helped:

Unfortunately, even after releasing and replacing the cassette with a new one, I was getting errors to say that it was empty. With quite a stock of paper and ink in the cupboard (enough for 72 prints, I decided to replace with the latest model: Aldi had a CP1300 on offer for £89 this week but that offer has now passed – you should be able to pick one up for around £99 at John Lewis (and elsewhere).

A new 4K monitor

I’ve been wanting to get a decent, large, high-resolution monitor for photo editing for a while now. The Mac Mini that I use only supports 1440p (2560×1440) but Picture In Picture/Picture By Picture (PIP/PBP) capabilities would be useful to also display 1080p (1920×1080) output from another PC and both my work PC (Microsoft Surface Pro 3) and personal PC (MacBook) can output at full 4K/UHD (3840×2160).

I considered a 28″ Samsung 4K UHD monitor (LU28E590) – currently about £289 – but the reviews suggesting lots of customers with faulty screens. Then I saw a newer, 32″ model: the U32J590, giving me a newer model with a larger panel for £379.

Initial impressions are good – and a former colleague asked me to send him a pic with two documents side by side at 100% – looks like this could be a useful work tool!

Finding digital copies of Ikea product instructions

My recent loft conversion means I have bought a lot of products from Ikea recently. Generally, I keep a digital copy of the assembly instructions and get rid of the paper ones but sometimes they aren’t easy to find on the UK website. Then I found a trick:

  1. Take the URL from a working document – for example https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/doc/assembly_instructions/best%C3%A5__aa-1402080-9_pub.pdf
  2. Look at the paper document that you want a copy of and look for a code on the last page – for example AA-1402080-9.
  3. Edit the URL from step 1, and you should be able to find the document you are after, in this case https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/doc/assembly_instructions/best%C3%A5__aa-1402080-9_pub.pdf.

 

Saving money on mobile calls and data whilst travelling in the USA

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Those who follow me on Twitter (@markwilsonit) may have noticed that I’ve been in the USA for the last couple of weeks. Normally, my overseas travel is in Europe, where the European Union (EU) Roaming Regulations mean I can use my bundled data and minutes – at least until Britain leaves the EU. Outside the European Economic Area (EEA) though, I need to pay for international-rate mobile data, voice and messaging.

As some degree of Internet access is pretty much required (and certainly very useful) when travelling these days, I considered buying a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) SIM in the States. A little bit of Internet research told me that wasn’t cheap either – mobile data is really expensive over there (though not as expensive as roaming with my normal UK SIM – 20p per MB doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that’s £200 for a GB!). A monthly contract was out of the question too, without a US-registered credit card.

Then I heard about UK mobile operator Three’s Go Roam offer. This allows you to use your data overseas (in 71 countries, within fair use limits) and to make UK calls and send texts to UK numbers as if you were at home. Following the advice from my local Three store, I took a monthly rolling contract and then served notice (30 days) the day after it had been activated, moving my SIM onto a PAYG basis, so I only had to pay for one month’s service.

So that was data sorted, but what about calls to non-UK numbers whilst I was away? My accommodation included Wi-Fi, so WhatsApp was useful whilst connected but that didn’t help with calling US numbers. I do have 60 minutes of Skype calls included in my Office 365 Home subscription though – and they were fine for making the odd call to US numbers whilst travelling!

I’m sure that these “hacks” have saved me tens, if not hundreds, of pounds during my US trip – and they might help others too. And for those who have a pay monthly contract with Vodafone, their Global Roaming option may be worth considering – paying a flat-rate £6 each day that you use the phone abroad could work out a little more expensive than the Three Go Roam deal but is likely to be much cheaper than standard roaming tariffs.

Poorly-targeted InMail on LinkedIn…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A good chunk of the email I receive is either:

  1. Spam from SEO specialists who can’t even present a well-written email (so why would I let them loose on my website?).
  2. Spam from people who want to advertise on my website or write content to link to their client’s dubious sites (no thanks).
  3. LinkedIn requests from recruiters I’ve never even spoken to (read on).

Now, let me be clear, there are some good recruiters out there: people who build rapport and work on relationships with people. Maybe one day we’ll work together, maybe we won’t but when I hear my peers talking about recruiters that I know, then I know they are well-connected within our industry and they will be my first port of call if I find myself looking for work (or to recruit).

Then there’s stuff like this, a real email, received tonight via LinkedIn’s InMail feature. I’ve changed the names to protect the guilty but apart from that, it’s a facsimile:

“Hi Mark,

[Do I know you?]

A leading global provider of retail software solutions is seeking an experienced EPOS Architect to join the European Portfolio team in a key leadership role at the heart of a massive digital transformation programme.

[Doesn’t appear to be very well researched: I’m an Enterprise Architect, not an EPOS Architect… I know very little about EPOS systems. Sure, maybe EPOS might be part of something I do put together but I’m no EPOS specialist. Well, it starts with E and ends with Architect – so it must be related! Does this recruiter even know what they are recruiting for?]

You’ll be working closely with the technical leadership of tier 1 global retailers such as huge retailer name removed, and leading national retailers across Europe to shape and deliver next generation cloud and on premise point of sale systems.

[Minor point but it’s “on-premises”, FFS. It’s a place, not an idea.]

An excellent package of £75,000 – £100,000 + car + bonus is on offer, plus extensive European travel to the headquarters of the continent’s leading businesses.

[Since when was “extensive European travel to the headquarters of the continent’s leading businesses” a perk? This is the sort of benefit dreamed up by people who never leave their office. What it generally means is “spend lots of time away from home travelling economy class to a business park but never really see the city you’re going to…”]

Further details: website/Job/Detail/epos-solution-architect-leeds-en-GB

[So it’s in Leeds. Leeds is 3 hours from where I live]

For a fully confidential discussion, contact someone.i.dont-know@recruiter.co.uk

 

Someone Else
Senior Recruitment Consultant @ leading global specialist recruitment group | Specialising in Testing across Yorkshire | someone.else@recruiter.com

[Why am I getting email on a Friday evening from one person I don’t know to ask me to contact someone else I don’t know? Mind you, if their specialism is “Testing across Yorkshire”, maybe that explains the poor targetting of this role to a guy 150 miles away in Milton Keynes…]”

Luckily, I’m not looking for work (or to hire anyone) at the moment but, when I am, this agency will not be on my list… sadly, this is not an isolated incident.

Bringing engineering to life with some Key Stage 2 schoolchildren and K’nex

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year, I signed up as a STEM Ambassador. With my employer’s backing, I can now volunteer to take part in events that are intended to bring Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects to life and demonstrate their value in life and in careers.

I receive regular invitations to take part in events but, until recently, I hadn’t been able to make them fit around my calendar. Then, a few weeks ago, I saw an invitation to run an engineering workshop with some Year 4-6 students as part of a school Science Day. The brief was to give a short presentation on:

  • What is STEM?
  • Why STEM skills are important
  • The story of what I was like at school and what I wanted to do for a job
  • What I do now
  • What I enjoy about my job

and then to facilitate an activity, breaking the children into small teams with a box of K’nex to build a tower that could support a small object.

I was pretty nervous about the activity – after all, I’m not a teacher! I spent quite a bit of time tuning the presentation and, taking advice from my own children (who are in years 6 and 8), making sure there were lots of images (that’s my style anyway) and animations. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the school, the animations were useless: PowerPoint 2010 didn’t like my 2016-based graphics so I quickly removed all of the transitions and animations – and the moral of the story there is don’t take advice from your 13 year-old…

I ran two workshops, each with a class of around 28 children. The teachers were present at all times (dealing with any disruptive children) and I found I just needed to be myself, to answer the children’s questions (which, of course, ranged from “what age can you start being an engineer?” to “what car do you drive?”) and to guide them during the activity.

I set out the activity as a challenge, with requirements and materials:

STEM engineering challenge, with requirements and materials

but I didn’t tell the children how to make a tower strong.

Time to test the towers

Only after we had tested it, did we spend some time talking about the things they had done to make their towers work (and all of them had managed this themselves, whether they did it consciously or not).

Making towers strong and stable

It was fantastic to see how each group approached the activity – each team had different ideas for how they might use the K’nex. Some children had played with it before whilst others needed some advice on how to make the connectors and rods fit together but almost every team completed the challenge successfully. The one team that didn’t complete the task had struggled because they had divided into two smaller groups and ended up with two short towers – that gave me an opportunity to talk about teamwork and also about project management (managing to time!).

I came away from school that afternoon with a great buzz. It’s wonderful to hear children say things like “I like your lessons – they’re fun!” and “Are you coming back next year?”. And, if you want to know more about STEM Ambassadors (either getting someone involved in an activity or event – or perhaps becoming one yourself), check out the website.

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 refuses to power on: fixed with a handful of elastic bands

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This week didn’t start well (and it hasn’t got much better either) but Monday morning was a write-off, as the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 that I use for work wouldn’t “wake up”.

I’d used it on Friday, closed the “lid” (i.e. closed the tablet against the Type Cover) and left it on a table all weekend. Come Monday and it was completely dead. I tried charging it for a while. I tried Power and Volume Up/Down combinations. I tried holding the power button down for 30 secs (at which point the light on the charging cable flashed, but that was all).

After speaking to colleagues in our support team, it seemed I’d tried everything they could think of and we were sure it was some sort of battery failure (one of my customers has seen huge levels of battery failure on their Surface Books, suspected to be after they were kept in storage for an extended period without having been fully shut down).

I was ready for a long drive to Stafford to swap it for another device, hoping that OneDrive had all of my data synced and that I didn’t get the loan Dell laptop with the missing key (I’m sure that’s a warning to look after our devices…).

Then I found a post on the Windows Central Forums titled “Surface Pro 3 won’t turn back on! – possible solution when all hope is lost”.

All hope was indeed lost. This had to be worth a read?

“My SP3 mysteriously stopped working yesterday morning. (Keep reading to the end for the solution that worked for me and maybe you too!)

It was fine the night before. […]

I spent the morning attempting to reboot the SP3. I thought maybe my charger wasn’t working even though I did see a white LED light on the adapter that connects to the Surface. I tried the hard reset, the 2-button reset, every combination of the volume up and down with the power button.

[…]

Finally, this morning, I caved in and call MS support. The tech said she would charge me $30 for a remote over the phone troubleshooting. I declined as I’ve tried everything I’ve found on the internet. Instead, I scheduled app with the MS store support in Garden City, NY (Roosevelt Field Mall).

I had the first or second app: 11:15am. The tech, I think his name was Adam, young guy in his 20’s. I told Adam my issue and that I’ve tried everything. I even had a USB LED light to show that the battery in my case wasn’t the problem. The USB LED light lit up for a few seconds when I pressed power. He said the problem was internal hardware and they there was no way to fix it. Since my SP3 was out of warranty, the only solution from MS was full replacement for $500. But, since I needed my files, a replacement won’t do me any good. So, the only other solution was have it sent to a third party data recovery place for $1000! They would basically destroy the SP3 and MS would then be unable to replace it.

Talk about bad options. Neither one seemed practical. I asked Adam if he’s seen this type of problem with any of the Surfaces before. He said maybe one or twice before. I was about to leave when another guy walked with his Surface, sat down next to me and said his Surface won’t boot up. I looked at Adam and I didn’t believe this was a rare issue with the Surface. MS probably train their techs to say that because they don’t want a class action law suit on their hand.

Anyway, just before I left, Adam, did say something, almost accidentally that I picked up. He said some guy had used a rubber band to hold down the power button for about a day and eventually the Surface woke up from sleep.

When I came home this afternoon, I was sure I had a $1100 paper weight with me. With nothing to lose, I took out some rubber bands and popsicle stick. I placed the popsicle stick flat against the power button and used the rubber band to apply pressure to keep the power button depressed the whole time. I can see the USB light connected to my Surface coming on and off as the power cycled. No sign of the Surface waking up.

Came back from dinner (that’s 5 hours later) and noticed the USB light didn’t come on and off any more. But still no sign the Surface was back. My 8 yr old sons comes into my office sees the contraption and says “what’s this” and pulls the popsicle stick off the Surface. I wasn’t even paying attention.

Lo and behold! the F—ing Surface logo flashed on the screen and booted up!!!!!
I immediately plugged in the charger and a backup HD and copied all my files!”

I was struggling to find any elastic bands at home but then, as the day’s post landed on my doormat, I thought “Royal Mail. Rubber bands!” and chased the postie down the street to ask if she had any spares. She was more than happy to give me a handful and so this was my setup (I don’t know what a “popsicle stick” is, but I didn’t need one):

A couple of hours later, I removed the bands and tried powering on the Surface Pro. I couldn’t believe it when it booted normally:

So, if your Surface Pro 3 (or possibly another Surface model) fails to power on, you might want to try this before giving up on it as a complete battery failure.

Explaining Office 365, with particular reference to the crossover between OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

For most of my career, I’ve worked primarily with Microsoft products. And for the last three years, I’ve worked in a consulting, services and education organisation that’s entirely focused on extracting value for our customers from their investments in Microsoft technology (often via an Enterprise Agreement, or similar). So, living in my Microsoft-focused bubble, it’s easy to forget that there are organisations out there for who deploying Microsoft products is not the first choice. And I’ve found myself in a few online conversations where people are perplexed about Office 365 and which tool to use when.

I used to use the Office 365 Wheel from OnPoint solutions until I discovered Matt Wade’s “Periodic Table of Office 365”, which attempts to describe Office 365’s “ecosystem of applications in the cloud” in infographic format:

The web version even lets you select by licence – so, for most of my customers, Enterprise E3 or E5.

But, as I said, I’ve also been in a few discussions recently where I’ve tried to help others (often those who are familiar with Google’s tools) to understand where SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams fit in – i.e. which is used in what scenario?

A few weeks ago, I found myself trying to do that on the WB-40 Podcast WhatsApp group, where one member had asked for help with the various “file” constructs and another had replied that “not even Microsoft” knew that. Challenge accepted.

So, in short form for social media, I replied to the effect that:

  1. Teams is unfinished (IMHO) but built on top of Office 365 Groups (and very closely linked to SharePoint).
  2. SharePoint can be used for many things including a repository for team-based information – regardless of what those teams are (projects, hierarchy, function).
  3. OneDrive is a personal document store.

In effect OneDrive can be used to replace “home drives” and SharePoint to provide wider collaboration features/capabilities when a document moves from being “something I’m working on” to “something I’m ready to collaborate on”. Teams layers over that to provide chat-based workspace and more.

And then I added a caveat to say that all of the above is the way we work and many others do but there is not one single approach that fits all. And don’t even get me started with Yammer…

The key point for me is that organisations really should have an information management strategy and associated architecture, regardless of the technology choices made.

And, just in case it helps, this is how one UK Government department approaches things (I would credit my source, but don’t want to get anyone into trouble):

They split up documents into a lifecycle:

  1. Documents start life with a user, so can go in OneDrive.
    • As the user collaborates with colleagues those colleagues can gain shared access to the document in OneDrive.
    • They proposed the use of 2-year deletion policies on all OneDrive for Business files [I would question why… storage is not an issue with Enterprise versions of Office 365, and arbitrary time-based deletion is problematic when you go back to a document for a reference and find it’s gone…].
  2. If the original document leads to a scoped piece of work then the Documents are moved to an Office 365 Group, as that neatly fits in with a number of resources that are common to collaboration: Planner, Calendar, File Storage (SharePoint), etc. And O365 Groups underpin Teams.
    • However, this type of data is time limited.
    • They proposed the use of 2-year deletion policies on all O365 Groups [again, why?].
  3. If a document became part of organisational policy/guidance, etc. then the proposal was to create permanent SharePoint sites for document management or potentially to move such documents to the organisation’s Intranet service [which could be running on SharePoint Online], or other relevant location.

So, you can see the lifecycle properties:

  1. User (limited need to know).
  2. Group (wider need to know).
  3. Organisation (everyone can know).

This plan has the potential to allow the organisation to manage data in a better way and minimise the costs of the additional storage required for SharePoint. But, core to that is turning the idea that OneDrive for Business is personal use on its head. It’s a valid place to store business data, but users should manage the lifecycle of data better. And this needs to be plain for the user to understand so they can spend the minimum amount of time managing the data.

[i.e. they don’t like the idea that OneDrive for Business is a personal data store – it’s a data store provided to users as part of their job and they don’t like “personal” being part of that definition. My 4pth is that the limits of “personal” and “work” are increasingly eroded, but I can see that organisations have legal and regulatory concerns about the data held in systems that they manage.]

So, which Office 365 tool to use? There is no “one size fits all” but some of the above may help when you’re defining a strategy/architecture for managing that information…