Microsoft Office 365 Forum

Will you ever fix onedrive syncing in office 365 (esp. in OneNote)?

Do you not realise that there are 1000s of students who want to use OneNote in linux but can't? If you implemented support, what product that allows them to do this do you think they would buy? Hint, it starts with C and ends in R.

As convenient as using the ms onedrive app directly sounds it is already possible to connect to onedrive on linux with rclone (https://rclone.org/).

Hi Robert,

You stumped me; can I get another clue?

In all seriousness, nope, I didn't release there were thousands of students clamoring for OneNote support, largely due to the fact that we haven't heard from them. Our developers have taken a look at this issue, but they weren't able to solve it easily. Since we don't hear too many requests for it, we haven't continued actively working on it since the initial investigation.

Our priorities for CrossOver development are informed both by how many people would be impacted by a change and how difficult it is to implement. Since this proved to be difficult to fix, we likely won't make any intentional progress anytime soon unless we start hearing from more people about this. Of course, there's always plenty of exciting changes happening in upstream Wine, so it's always possible this could get incidentally fixed.

Best,
Meredith

@Pentadrago

I don't think that method would support the optimised syncing mechanism that onenote uses.

@Meredith

Fair enough. Good to know the truth (i.e. no plans to fix this), than to just be told in a ticket that it's "on our bug list" (implying it might be worked on someday).

Meredith Johnson wrote:

I didn't release there were thousands of students clamoring for
OneNote support, largely due to the fact that we haven't heard from
them. Our developers have taken a look at this issue, but they
weren't able to solve it easily. Since we don't hear too many
requests for it, we haven't continued actively working on it since
the initial investigation.

Hi @Meredith I just downloaded Crossover trial specifically to (try to) run OneNote. If I understood you correctly, OneNote is known not to be working in any version, because of the OneDrive issues. Is this correct?

If so, then you can certainly add me to the list of people you heard from regarding the need to get this working.

In fact, OneNote, and Visio to a degree, are the only MS apps that still do not have reasonable, and cross-platform alternative available on Linux. With LibreOffice steady progress, very few hard-core Office users will insist on having Word/Excel/etc on Linux. But for OneNote, there is simply no alternative that comes even close.

And yes, it it true, huge numbers of users, and probably in particular students are depending on OneNote, especially since it's free on Windows 10. We are talking about many milions of OneNote serious users that amassed huge amounts of information in OneNote, and have absolutely no way to migrate it - even if they had an alternative to migrate to. This people are right now locked in to Windows, just like I am.

OneDrive, and by extension is integration with SharePoint, is a critical part of MS strategy extending from office apps to 365 cloud, desktop management and backup, desktop profiles and portability, and all the way to Teams. Without OneDrive working, selling CrossOver as a way to run MS apps will be very frustrating for many, and very soon, for most.

Thanks for listening.
Andrej

Microsoft Office 365 appears to be working reasonably well in Crossover 21 -- with the notable exception of OneDrive sync. Since I'm logged in to my Microsoft account I can see my recently opened files in the "Files" tab, but when I go to open them I get an error message: "Sorry we couldn't open . . . " I would also like to see OneDrive sync support.

Just buy Insync. Works just fine.

Another vote for getting native onedrive syncing supported in Crossover. Was a little disappointed to see this didn't work despite the "runs well" rating in the application list. I would not classify this as running well without the onedrive support, since the whole Office\Microsoft 365 platform is based on the apps being able to sync between each other via onedrive.

For what it's worth, here's my setup for allowing O365 apps under Crossover to open and synchronise with OneDrive:

1. Install the free, open source Onedriver, which will create a symlink to your OneDrive. Onedriver keeps everything up to date, both when you update, and when there's an update to OneDrive in the cloud. Let's say on my system the symlink is called onedrive.
2. Inside the Office 365 bottle in Crossover, select Open C: Drive. On my system that opens up the file manager app (Dolphin in my case since I'm running KDE)
3. Create a symlink to onedrive. The approach will differ depending on your system. On mine via the GUI (KDE's Dolphin file manager) I did this:
   1. Go to where you want the symlink created (I went to c:/users/crossover/Documents)
   2. Right-click and select Create New then Link to File or Directory
   3. Follow the instructions to set your Onedriver symlink as the target, and give a name to the symlink to be accessed via the bottle (eg onedrive_bottle for clarity, but I just called mine onedrive as well)
   4. OneDrive docs can be accessed locally by selecting from the symlink onedrive_bottle

I expect you can create the relevant symlink from the terminal if you know (1) path to your Onedriver symlink and (2) path to the folder in the Office365 bottle. On my system that is /home/<username>/.cxoffice/Microsoft_Office_365/dosdevices/c:/users/crossover/Documents.

Michael wrote:

For what it's worth, here's my setup for allowing O365 apps under Crossover to open and synchronise with OneDrive:

That doesn't work for OneNote as the OneDrive api doesn't support OneNote files and so onedriver doesn't work either for that.

I know this post is from a while back. When it comes to OneDrive syncing support, I've actually had a pretty positive experience with it. I use it quite a bit for work and it's been pretty reliable overall.