Forthcoming improvements
With our new V3 technology, Cloud Drive Mapper (CDM) has a long and exciting life ahead. While we are not ready to publish our strategic roadmap for CDM here, we have received many queries about future updates. Here are some of the more critical features and improvements planned for release in the next few months:
Mapping drives directly to folders (Deep linking)
One complexity of deep linking is the inability to interrogate a folder to determine all its applied permissions. Mainly because folders can also be affected by inherited permissions, which are either set deeper in the directory – normally at the root – which is hierarchically below the drive mapping.
Additionally, the fact that loss of information is out of a mapped drive’s scope but within the scope of a document library adds to nuances that need handling.
For example, what if someone in your organization moves a file out of a deep-linked folder without CDM realizing the move operation has occurred? In this scenario, CDM assumes that you’ve deleted the file. With deep linking, CDM will have a layered understanding of the single file system.
Search component
In terms of handling search, CDM’s performance is the same and sometimes even worse than WebDAV (depending on what you are searching for). We have designed a new search component to significantly enhance CDM’s ability to handle searches.
Rather than trying to enumerate in real-time (which mirrors the search pattern employed by File Explorer), CDM’s search component will bypass this to make direct use of indexing and deep content search capabilities within SharePoint Online.
Bridging the Office co-auth save gap
CDM V3 has a native integration into the Office co-authoring flow. When you open an Office file (such as a Word document) on a CDM drive, CDM launches the Office app relevant to the file, and the Office app starts reading the file. Concurrently, CDM activates co-authoring for the Office file. At this point, the Office app switches from the local version of the file to its online version.
As you work on the file, its online version updates in real time. However, the original, local copy doesn’t get updated in real time - only periodically when CDM sees the cloud version is more recent.
Suppose you save a file you’re working on and then immediately copy and paste it into an email to share it with a colleague. It is entirely possible that the drive might not have been updated yet, and the file in your email is outdated.
We are implementing a backward sync capability that will activate when Office files are open to ensure that the local copy is kept up-to-date with the cloud version.
Thumbnail handler
Currently, in CDM V3, thumbnails are intentionally not rendered yet as we need to finish some browse optimizations and create a simple dedicated handler for thumbnails. This is a relatively small piece of work that has already been architected. Still, as this is deemed a slightly lower priority than some of the other features mentioned, this may be finished and released around the end of the year.
SharePoint Online (SPO) Check-in Check-out automation
While CDM V3 supports check-in check-out, we’ve noticed that some third-party apps can’t infer that files on CDM drives are hosted in SPO, meaning that CDM is essentially blocking such apps from being able to check-in check-out on your behalf.
This only affects some apps, like AutoCAD, and only when check-out is set to optional in SPO. If it’s set to Mandatory, CDM V3 supports it fine.
We have a feature in development to bridge this gap that will allow CDM to automate the check-in and check-out of certain files instead of relying on third-party apps.
Not only will this feature address this gap, but it will also be an improvement on V2, a feature we’ve been regularly asked about for many years. So it will be great to be able to handle this properly.
Dynamic: Custom drives
The underlying architecture is already in place for custom drives; we just have to update Iris to allow admins to configure them. Once we’ve done this, you’ll be able to create a new, unique kind of Dynamic Drive that enables you to define what you want inside of it. For more information, please see Dynamic: Custom.
Auto-assign drive letter
Currently, CDM supports static drive assignment only. This means that when you map a drive using CDM, you can only assign the drive a permanent, fixed drive letter. While static drive assignment works in most environments, it can cause issues if the chosen letter is already in use.
To address this, we are working on a feature that will give you more flexibility when assigning letters to your CDM drives.
This feature will enable you to allocate multiple letters to a drive so that when CDM assigns one of your allocated letters to the drive, it’ll check letters assigned to other drives based on their order in the mapping group and assign the letter from your list that is not already in use by another drive.
Multi-language support for the CDM client
Unlike CDM v2.x (aka Cloud Drive Mapper Legacy), the CDM V3 client only supports English. However, we want to ensure that V3, much like its predecessor, continues to cater to our diverse global user base.
The work for the CDM v3 client to support multiple languages is in progress, with implementation planned in due course.
