SUNY New Paltz Onedrive and Office Online

As part of your access to Microsoft 365/SharePoint Online, faculty and staff also receive

A personal SUNY New Paltz OneDrive – One Terabyte of space where you can store your “personal work files” and selectively share them with others
Access to Office Online – Web-based versions of all the applications in the Microsoft Office suite

Only your personal account is eligible for a SUNY New Paltz OneDrive — shared accounts are not eligible. For group or departmental sharing you should instead apply for a SharePoint site collection (a.k.a. a SharePoint team site)

!!!SENSITIVE DATA WARNING!!!

Users should follow our Confidential Information Policy. Any data with Social Security Numbers, passwords, credit card numbers, or other sensitive data should not be stored on OneDrive.

SUNY New Paltz OneDrive

Your SUNY New Paltz OneDrive is a SharePoint document library — an implementation of Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business. It is located in SUNY New Paltz's tenant in Microsoft’s cloud-based Microsoft 365. You can synchronize files you store in the cloud to multiple personal computers and access them from a wide variety of mobile devices. You can also share files and folders with people both inside and outside SUNY New Paltz. Learn more about OneDrive for Business on the following pages, which include brief videos and answers to common questions: OneDrive for Business – Online File Sharing and What is OneDrive for Business? You can also view a series of brief video tutorials.

Once you are licensed for Microsoft 365/SharePoint Online, you can access your SUNY New Paltz OneDrive using the login instructions for SharePoint Online. The first time you log in, Microsoft 365 will begin to provision your Personal Site. Once you are logged in to Microsoft 365, click on the “waffle” icon at the left end of the top navigation bar to display the app launcher and then click on the “OneDrive” button. You should do this one time to initialize your SUNY New Paltz OneDrive before trying to access it from inside an Office application such as Word.

FAQs and How-to’s

What’s the difference between OneDrive (the consumer version) and OneDrive for Business (your SUNY New Paltz OneDrive)? You may already have a standalone consumer version OneDrive, or one that came as part of a personal Office 365 subscription, e.g., one that came with a new computer.
- Your SUNY New Paltz OneDrive will appear in Office Save/Open dialogues as “OneDrive – State University of New York at New Paltz”
- If you have a personal, consumer version of OneDrive, it will appear as “OneDrive – Personal”
Should I save my documents to my SUNY New Paltz OneDrive or to a SharePoint team site? Think of the two this way:
- My SUNY New Paltz OneDrive is for *my* documents, some of which I may wish to share, selectively, with others.
- A SharePoint team site is for *our* documents that we share together. Documents that should persist for other’s use after you leave SUNY New Paltz Should be stored in a SharePoint site rather than your OneDrive.
You might also find this Microsoft article useful: Should I save my documents to my OneDrive for Business [SUNY New Paltz OneDrive] or a team site?

Office Online

You can edit the files in your SUNY New Paltz OneDrive or anywhere else in Microsoft 365/SharePoint Online (but not on your desktop) using web-based versions of Microsoft Office applications, collectively known as Office Online. When you view the list of your online files in a web browser, simply click on a file to view it in the Office Online app; then, to edit it, choose “Edit in Online” from the “Edit Document” dropdown menu.

Office Online apps offer simultaneous editing, so you can collaborate in real time on files you share with others.

Note that Office Online is web-based, so you can only use Office Online apps within your web browser, to view and edit files that are stored in the cloud.

SUNY New Paltz OneDrive and Office Online are available to all faculty and staff. Requests for student use, e.g., for research, must be made by faculty or staff.