I’ve dealt with OneDrive for Business sync issues for years and probably have about 100 hours of support under my belt. Most issues have occurred because of the Groove sync client. Recently, I had the ‘pleasure’ of fixing GoDaddy’s Office 365 and OneDrive for Business problems.
Two clients were referred to me by Call That Girl (Lisa Hendrickson). She is an expert in Outlook and O365 migrations. She has a great podcast too-you should check her out at www.callthatgirl.biz.
GoDaddy’s Office 365 Software is Outdated
I’m making this observation based on just two clients I helped in the same week. It could be that some tenants get updated with the new Admin Center and new OneDrive For Business (ODFB) sync client. However, these two didn’t.
They came to me with sync issues and when I logged in, they both had the old Admin Center. All of us using O365 on our own have control over (to a certain extent), if we want to see the ‘new’ experience or the old. These clients didn’t have a choice.
My plan was to first check their Admin center to make sure they had enabled the new sync client, the OneDrive sync button, Sync Client for SharePoint and the new SP Lists and Libraries experience (see illustration below). Unfortunately, these options aren’t available with the old Admin Center.
Fixing GoDaddy O365 ODFB Sync Issues
I wrote an extensive article in late 2015 on how to fix OneDrive For Business Sync issues that dealt specifically with the groove.exe client. I realized that none of the newer OneDrive instructions would work for these clients.
For these clients, I had to manually stop OneDrive, stop the running process and even go into folders in the hidden AppData folder to delete groove and other folders that stubbornly keep groove coming back.
After I was sure groove.exe was gone, I did not trust the link on the O365 tenant from within GoDaddy to give me the newest OneDrive client, so I went to Microsoft’s site to get and install it.
Then I went online to first start at OneDrive and start up the sync. knew when I got the message, ‘Do you want to switch apps’, the new sync client was installed. The screen after that is below. The client signed up and we selected which folders to sync and the new sync client was then installed and working.
I then went to SharePoint and started that sync. A lot of people don’t know that the original groove.exe client was not made for syncing SharePoint libraries. It would do it, but it did it badly. That’s how I got my dozens of hours of troubleshooting experience in – fixing these problems.
What About Leaving GoDaddy’s Office 365?
As I said at the beginning, I’ve only seen two client issues, but I decided to visit the GoDaddy forums and typed in some searches on sync, OneDrive and SharePoint and got quite an education on people’s problems.
Anyone can get into the GoDaddy forums and do searches. I was looking at some SharePoint sync problems here and made a reply to someone’s comment on their SharePoint sync problems. To post a comment, I did have to use my GoDaddy account.
The experience I had with my clients was that they both had talked to GoDaddy support, but they couldn’t get any solutions from them. That’s why they went online, found Lisa at CallThatGirl.biz and since she doesn’t like to support OneDrive, she sent them to me.
Why Did Microsoft Partner With GoDaddy?
There’s got to be a financial incentive there, but I can’t say for sure.
I recall when setting up my O365, it was particularly easy to set up my domain if GoDaddy was my domain registrar. Microsoft announced this partnership with GoDaddy in 2014, so it’s been around for a while.
I know of no other Office 365 partnership Microsoft has with any other domain registrar/host.
Summary
For those of you out there using Office 365 and GoDaddy, if you’re happy with the service, stay with them. But my recommendation would be to close your account there and get your own Office 365 business account through Microsoft.
This link takes you to ‘Nellie’s post on the GoDaddy forum where she told how she got off on her own. Her instructions may or may not work for you – I’m not saying they will. If you don’t feel confident doing this on your own, contact www.callthatgirl.biz as she specializes in this.