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Microsoft’s collaboration tools seem designed to ensure no matter what, every file will end up in multiple places online and as multiple local copies. Click a link in MS teams chat. Are you working in one person’s weird sharepoint without them even knowing they are using sharepoint? Company sharepoint? Onedrive? Nobody knows. Oops, you don’t have permission to edit anyway and the sharer doesn’t know how to add you. Congratulations now you are owner of the local file presentation-v2_JW-comments.pptx. When you drag that back into teams, now it’s on your weird personal sharepoint that you yourself didn’t even know existed.

Oh, your company trained everyone how to make sure all files are on the company sharepoint? Not going to stick because the online versions lack extremely basic features like copy-paste that works reliably and “merge cells”. You can open online files in the desktop app, but you’ll soon be back to a local copy because working online in the desktop app is unusable for things like “dragging a text box around”.

iCloud collaboration works fine in my experience but only on Macs which makes it a non-starter for most companies. And can you even have have a company-wide iCloud files system, or can you only share individual files with people?




Does iCloud collaboration not work in a browser, through icloud.com? I'm pretty sure it does.

You can't do folder sharing though which is definitely a non starter for most orgs.


It does but I think in general MS products will be more attractive to a mixed (PC/Mac) organization than iCloud. It's virtually impossible in most industries to not have to work with MS Office documents with external parties (and internal, good luck hiring legal or accounting people and telling them they can only use icloud).

Even though I really prefer google drive to anything else, it also suffers from this problem, too. Even if it were perfect at editing native Office documents, you still inevitably end up with people saving files as office documents and working locally for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons.




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