Cloud Drive Mapper major update!

For the past 12 months we've been working hard on improving the cookie handling and authentication technologies within Cloud Drive Mapper. In that time we've developed a range of improvements to the product to increase its stability and compatibility with third parties SSO & MFA services. You can check them out here: www.iamcloud.com/changelog

Cloud Drive Mapper uses browser cookies to establish a persistent connection to Office 365 in order to securely and reliably map drives to the cloud storage. What we've been finding though is that there can be, in certain circumstances and environments, occasions when those Office 365 cookies can be disrupted by other processes - could be user behaviour, could be other applications using Office 365 cookies at the same time etc. The consequence of this for those users affected was that it could mean the mapped drives periodically dropped out or didn't map properly in the first place. While this has been a fairly rare occurrence only affecting a small proportion of users, it has been something our development team has been working hard on fixing once and for all. 

The underlying problem, which has made this particular problem difficult to fix, is that the cookies in question have been out of the control of Cloud Drive Mapper. They're Office 365 IE browser cookies, and fair game to any processes or applications that also has the permission to use them (web browsers, other applications, Word etc).

I'm very happy to say though that in our latest release Cloud Drive Mapper 2.3 we have made a major breakthrough with this problem. We have taken a new route to handling cookies using completely different technology, and reports from the field (our beta tests) have been excellent. In summary, what we have done is built in our very own Chromium engine into Cloud Drive Mapper itself. So it has its own private secure browser session available for us to handle cookies without so many variables being able to disrupt them. This is a major step forwards for Cloud Drive Mapper and provides an incredibly robust solution against a wide range of external variables and processes. 

The recent changes to the authentication and cookie systems also means Cloud Drive Mapper now has native access into the Office 365 GraphAPI. I won't go into the specifics of what that means  right now, but in summary we have just unlocked a huge amount of potential for what Cloud Drive Mapper can do. We are already working on a few commonly requested features - features that simply weren't technically achievable with the old technology and protocols. You'll be hearing from me again once we've completed the first of the new features, which I'm pretty excited about and hope you're going to love. 

REALLY IMPORTANT ACTION NEEDED BEFORE YOU UPGRADE

The new Cloud Drive Mapper client uses ADAL (Microsoft's 'modern authentication' protocol) by default. This will mean that without making any tweaks to registry/group policy it will automatically work with all major SSO & MFA providers including ADFS, Azure AD SSO, Okta, OneLogin, PingID, IAM Cloud, VMWare ID Manager, native Office 365 auth, Centrify and more. 

BUT in order for Cloud Drive Mapper to use ADAL with Office 365, you need to grant permission in Azure AD. We strongly recommend you do this before rolling out the upgrade to your users - instructions here. By doing this you can grant permission on behalf of all your users. It will only take you a couple of minutes do do this, and it only needs to be done once. If you do not do this, your users will be individually prompted to grant their permission and will not be able to utilise any Cloud Drive Mapper functionality that relies on admin-granted permissions in SharePoint Online. So please follow the simple instructions linked above before you upgrade to avoid these issues. If you've got any questions, please contact support@iamcloud.com for guidance. 

 
If you're not familiar with Cloud Drive Mapper, by the way, it's the leading enterprise-ready drive mapping system for Office 365 cloud storage, created by Microsoft Gold Partners / Worldwide MS Partners of the Year 2015, IAM Cloud!

For existing customers wanting to download the latest version, visit https://resources.iamcloud.net, for new organisations not currently using Cloud Drive Mapper - sign-up to a free trial today