OneDrive Files on Demand – first steps

After much anticipation and playing with Windows Insider previews OneDrive Files on Demand finally hit general release alongside Windows 10 1709 (Fall Creators Update) the other week. I’ve been giving it a test drive over the past week or two along with fellow Network tech Matt Stevens – here’s a few of our observations so far along with workarounds for a couple of teething issues.

Windows 10 build

There is one pretty important requirement to bear in mind with the new Files on Demand feature; it’s only available in build 1709 and above. That means you need to be on the semi-annual (aka CB) branch rather than the LTSB route that some people have taken.

Ref: https://blog.juriba.com/windows-10-branching-timeline

It’s new features like Files on Demand that make the additional work of staying up-to-date worthwhile; so far we have a couple of hundred laptops running 1703 without too much fuss so 1709 should slot in fairly smoothly as we build our images layer-by-layer now using only the pure Microsoft WIM as a starting point.

We tamed (nuked) the built-in apps via a very handy Powershell script we found online (also see alternative version here) that runs during MDT deployment and the Start Menu default tiles are cleaned up via a GPO layout file. Configure your Windows Store for Business (or Education as case would have it), tweak a few more policies for Cortana, Telemetry etc. and Windows 10 becomes much more manageable even on the latest build.

Why Files on Demand?

If you don’t know what all the fuss is about check out the initial Insider announcement:

Ref: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/06/13/onedrive-files-demand-now-available-windows-insiders/#kwLbqguOTefId6pv.97

Ref: https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/05/11/introducing-onedrive-files-on-demand-and-additional-features-making-it-easier-to-access-and-share-files/?eu=true

What it basically means is that we can finally integrate (huge amounts of) cloud storage with our on-premise desktops in a much tighter fashion and dispense with (unsupported) scripts or (expensive) third party tools to access OneDrive on a Windows desktop using File Explorer. It also means not having to deal with WebDAV, which always felt a horribly dated and clunky protocol to use for accessing cloud storage.

As soon as the 1709 ISO hit VLSC I grabbed it from Microsoft, slotted the new WIM into one of my MDT Task Sequences and deployed a VM to give the production version a try. It shows much promise but as always there’s some gotchas that mean nothing is ever quite straightforward.

Client version

Microsoft being Microsoft always have one shoot-self-in-foot moment whenever a new product comes out and this release was no exception. Despite having the freshly downloaded 1709 ISO I noticed that on first launch the client was showing up as 2016 and not the latest 2017 (17.3.7076.1026) that brings in Files on Demand

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/New-OneDrive-sync-client-release-notes-845dcf18-f921-435e-bf28-4e24b95e5fc0

that’s the one that you want…

There’s a useful summary of the client install \ update process below. It does strike me as odd that the client self-updates and installs from appdata rather than being managed by WSUS.

Ref: http://deploynovellas.com/2016/05/25/install-onedrive-ngsc-update-windows-10-osd

Similarly it also takes a while to update when deployed on a clean 1709 build due to the initial client being out-of-date. This also means if a user is a bit too quick off the mark they can end up with an old-school full sync rather than Files on Demand.

I’ve been trying to replace the client during the deployment Task Sequence but more testing is required as my initial attempt failed with “Application Microsoft OneDrive 17.3.7073.1013 returned an unexpected return code: 1”.

Ref: http://model-technology.com/next-gen-onedrive-deployment-during-sccm-osd

I’ve added a Suspend action to the Task Sequence and will examine the logs to see what’s going on as the script tries to run…

Group Policy

To get more control over how the client is used grab the updated Group Policy templates from the local installation folder %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\BuildNumber\adm\

Ref: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Use-Group-Policy-to-control-OneDrive-sync-client-settings-0ecb2cf5-8882-42b3-a6e9-be6bda30899c

We force Files on Demand to be enabled as we don’t want sync cache eating up drive space on machines. We also configure our tenant ID (found via the Azure AD portal) so only Office 365 accounts can be used.

Configure these under Computer Settings > Administrative Templates > OneDrive

• Allow syncing OneDrive accounts for only specific organizations > Enabled (using Tenant ID)
• Enable OneDrive Files On-Demand > Enabled
• Silently configure OneDrive using the primary Windows account > Enabled

I need to check if our third-party identity provider supports ADAL to make sure that last GPO setting works correctly. In the future we may well move to Azure AD Connect Passthrough authentication instead.

Clearing local cache (Free up space)

One important thing to remember about using Files on Demand is that when a file is either downloaded from the cloud, or freshly uploaded to it a cached copy will be kept on the local machine.

Over time (or with a large upload) this cache could grow and cause similar issues to what we were trying to avoid, especially with a shared machine and large volumes of users (pretty much the case for all our classroom machines)

At present it seems that no policies exist to force the “Free up space” option that removes the cached copies of files. However the article below suggests that using the new file attributes that have been brought in with 1709 can automate the process.

“Attrib.exe enables 2 core scenarios.  “attrib -U +P /s”, makes a set of files or folders always available and “attrib +U -P /s”, makes a set of files or folders online only.”

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/OneDrive-Blog/OneDrive-Files-On-Demand-For-The-Enterprise/ba-p/117234

We tried a script that runs on the root OneDrive folder and sure enough it resets all files back to Online only and reduces the space used down to a megabyte or so 🙂

cd "%userprofile%\Onedrive - Name of your Organisation"
attrib +U -P /s

Running this script on Logoff should in theory keep the cache files down to the bare minimum.

Disclaimer: we only just figured this one out today so again caveat emptor if you go and run this in production without testing it first!!!