MySites vs OneDrive

Question

I'm having this debate with my manager and was hoping someone could help shed the light. He seems to think MySites has been renamed to OneDrive and MySites is being deprecated.

But the way I understand it, MySites is still the Service / Application and OneDrive is just a document library within. It is either connected to the cloud or hosted on prem. Is this accurate?

I know MS re-branded SkyDrive to OneDrive, maybe that's where he's getting confused

Answer 1

In general, "My site" is a very poor term. Here are the terms that I typically use:

"My Site Host" site collection. This is typically a single site collection that can allow all users to see "About Me" and allow functions such as "People Search". This site collection can exist without a single "Personal site" and without "One Drive For business libraries". All users have "Read" permissions on this site collection and can edit own profiles.

A personal site is a site collection that contains the One Drive for Business Library. This Personal site "Site Collection", unfortunately, gets created when you press on "OneDrive" Link. But it is effectively not only "OneDrive". One Drive For business is the Library that gets created within this "Personal Site". This is why most are confused. This link is also poorly named because what gets created is a "One Drive For business" Library and not "One Drive" Library.

Many of the social features depends on the fact that you have a "Personal Site".

A Personal site collection will also contain a blog sub-site. That blog sub-site is not part of One Drive for Business, but is part of your Personal site collection.

Answer 2

OneDrive is different with MySites. Unless you were referring to OneDrive for business which is the same with MySites

OneDrive for Business uses a platform called SharePoint to give each member of your team a place to store and work on documents with others. Because it uses SharePoint it also provides more administration option for working with documents. It does not require being on the cloud and can be installed on your servers. OneDrive for Business is first a synchronization tool

Microsoft has a public offering called OneDrive. This is a personal online storage service, easily comparable to one you may already know, Dropbox. You store files in your OneDrive and access them from anywhere or even send links to people so they can see it based on the permissions given. This service is often included if you have an outlook.com account or even a Windows Phone, large email attachments and phone pictures will automatically be uploaded to your personal online storage, OneDrive.

Original posts are What is OneDrive for Business and what does it do and OneDrive for Business vs OneDrive – Know the difference