Mapping drives for applications that don't natively support Sharepoint

Many customers are now leveraging SharePoint to fully utilize their Microsoft 365 subscriptions, often moving their data from on-premises file servers. While this transition offers numerous benefits, it also introduces challenges ranging from governance to crafting effective migration plans. However, one of the most significant hurdles is the lack of support for legacy applications that don’t natively integrate with SharePoint.

Take, for example, software X, a business-critical application that allows users to save and upload files through a mapped drive, such as T:. Migrating the contents of the T: drive to SharePoint poses a dilemma: the application doesn’t support SharePoint integration, yet maintaining a hybrid setup—some data in SharePoint and the rest on-premises—requires additional licensing, maintenance, and infrastructure costs.

So, how do you solve this problem?

The answer is Cloud Drive Mapper by IAMCloud. One of its many features bridges the gap between legacy systems and SharePoint, enabling seamless integration without disrupting business operations. With Cloud Drive Mapper, you can retain the functionality of your mapped drives while leveraging the benefits of SharePoint, ensuring a smooth and efficient transition to the cloud.

Scenario

Users launch a shared desktop environment (e.g., AVD or Citrix) and open Application X. This application generates bespoke files that need to be saved to a mapped drive (T:). Additionally, users often need to open files from the same T: drive within Application X.

Currently, the T: drive is a mapped network drive hosted on a traditional on-premises file share.

The objective is to continue to use Application X after the content of the T: drive has been moved to SharePoint.

Cloud Drive Mapper Configuration

Please read the official documentation for detailed steps here.

Email us at Sales@Auxilium-it.com to help you get set up with a trial and discuss the product capabilities.

You will need to register Cloud Drive Mapper as an Enterprise Application in your Entra tenant.

Once you have access to the CDM portal you can start configuring it to use on your environment.

Start by adding some admin accounts, these can be tenancy admins if you have other products from IAMCloud to manage or CDM admins.

Under Providers configure the AD attribute you wish to use to authenticate and enable SSO to ensure users have a seamless experience.

Now configure your Default Mapping group

When you click add drive you have the following options, dynamic drives are really useful if you want to map the entire site under one letter. More on that here.

In this example we only want to map T: to a specific site or library in SharePoint.

It would look something like this

At this point, you’re ready to start using Cloud Drive Mapper (CDM).

If you’re planning to deploy CDM across multiple clients, there are several deployment options available. You can explore these options in detail here.

For this example, we’ll keep it simple and run the executable directly. You can download the installer from the portal.

The License Key is how CDM clients knows what to map you can get the key from the Portal Dashboard.

NOTE: Cloud Drive Mapper (CDM) does not access your data directly. Instead, it relies on the user’s credentials to enumerate and access the SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive libraries they are authorized to use. This ensures that when an entire site is mapped, users will only see the content they have permissions to view. Furthermore, CDM will not map a drive unless the user has the necessary permissions for the target resource, maintaining a secure and streamlined experience.

Once installed and started you can find it it in the systray,

Cloud Drive Mapper will attempt to sign you in using your credentials and map the drives you’ve configured in the portal. If Single Sign-On (SSO) is enabled, the process will be almost seamless for the user—the mapped drive will simply appear in File Explorer.

At this point you would be able to use application X just like the T: drive was still on premise completely transparent to the user.

Conclusion

As demonstrated, Cloud Drive Mapper (CDM) provides both administrators and customers with a seamless way to continue using applications that don’t natively support SharePoint. It also simplifies the transition to SharePoint, especially for users resistant to change who are accustomed to accessing everything through mapped drives.

Additionally, CDM can help facilitate the adoption of OneDrive without requiring data synchronization on shared desktops or published app scenarios, significantly reducing the storage footprint of user profiles. This versatile tool offers a range of benefits, from enabling SharePoint adoption to decommissioning old file servers, even when critical dependencies remain.

In a future post, I’ll show you how to use CDM to redirect user documents to OneDrive without relying on OneDrive Sync, and how to manage a gradual migration for users.