How Premier Trailer Leasing got past its SharePoint migration wall
CASE STUDY · TRANSPORT & LOGISTICS
Every SharePoint Online migration hits the same wall: users refuse to give up mapped drives. IT teams have been trying to get around this problem for a decade, mostly unsuccessfully. Premier Trailer Leasing (the second-largest trailer leasing company in North America, 300+ staff across 48 locations in the US, Canada and Mexico) sat behind that wall for years. Cloud Drive Mapper was what got them past it. As a bonus, it standardised the drive-letter chaos that had accumulated across a distributed IT estate, and let Premier retire an entire RDP-server tier by pushing consistent user mappings into an Azure Virtual Desktop environment.
If it was not for Cloud Drive Mapper, we would not have moved from on-prem to SharePoint, because it was a blockage.
Ebrima Kalleh, Senior IT Systems Engineer, Premier Trailer Leasing
The challenge: two walls in one migration
Premier had spent years trying to move off on-premises file servers and onto SharePoint Online, and had run into the pattern every IT team knows. Users did not want to use SharePoint through a browser. They wanted the mapped drives they had used for years. Any cloud-storage change that failed to preserve that experience did not survive contact with actual users, and the migration stalled repeatedly.
The blockage why we did not even move from file servers to SharePoint was because people don't want to use SharePoint online. But when we found Cloud Drive Mapper, that was an easy zero. We tell them, oh, we can map it like we map your drive, so you will not even notice the difference.
Ebrima Kalleh, Senior IT Systems Engineer, Premier Trailer Leasing
The second wall was operational. With 48 locations, drive mapping had accumulated from every method IT had ever tried: some mapped centrally through Intune, others by manual user actions, others by scripts inherited from earlier admins. The predictable result was drive-letter conflicts: multiple mappings competing for the same letter, users manually remapping over centrally-managed drives, and support tickets from staff who could not reach files they had been able to reach the day before.
On top of both, Premier's Azure Virtual Desktop estate had its own friction. Users had to leave their AVD session to find files that lived in mappings on their laptop, then return. Two places to look for one document, on every task.
The solution: one authority for drive letters, everywhere
Cloud Drive Mapper solved both walls from a single deployment. On the user-adoption side, CDM presents SharePoint Online content as familiar mapped drives with real file paths, so the browser-UX objection dissolves. Users get the experience they insisted on, and the SharePoint migration finally cleared its adoption hurdle. On the operational side, CDM became the single authority for drive letters across Premier's estate. The conflicts stopped because there was only one system handing letters out.
Deployment took a week end to end. Ebrima's specific observation was that the CDM documentation covered Premier's scenario almost exactly, so most of the configuration was picking the right approach and running it, rather than inventing one.
The AVD estate benefit was not on the original project plan. CDM on an AVD host is user-based, not server-based, so multiple users on one AVD server each see their own drive mappings inside their own session, exactly matching what they see on their laptop. That single behaviour let Premier retire an RDP-server tier that had been kept alive largely to serve file access. The AVD estate carries that workload now, and users no longer switch out of a session to reach a file.
The data is in SharePoint and is online, so they can have it anywhere at any time they want.
Ebrima Kalleh, Senior IT Systems Engineer, Premier Trailer Leasing
Results
The SharePoint Online migration completed. Drive-letter conflicts are gone. The IT team spends materially less time on drive-mapping issues, freeing capacity for higher-value work. An entire tier of RDP servers has been retired, and the AVD estate now provides the same file experience as a user's laptop from inside every session. Users, in Premier's own summary, "definitely find it very useful, because they know the difference before and after".
The character of the outcome that comes up most often in the case-study interview is the low ongoing load. Once deployed, CDM stops being something the engineering team thinks about. That is uncommon for cloud storage middleware, and it is what earned the recommendation:
We just deploy it, and it works. I'll recommend Cloud Drive Mapper to everybody and anybody.
Ebrima Kalleh, Senior IT Systems Engineer, Premier Trailer Leasing
About Premier Trailer Leasing
Premier Trailer Leasing is one of the largest trailer leasing companies in North America, headquartered in Plano, Texas. The company operates across the United States, Canada and Mexico from a network of 48 locations, with approximately 300 staff and a fleet supporting logistics and transportation businesses nationwide.
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