How Shropshire Homes stopped paying twice for SharePoint, and saved £12,000 a year
CASE STUDY · CONSTRUCTION
Shropshire Homes, a UK regional housebuilder specialising in the conversion of historic and listed buildings into modern properties, was paying twice for SharePoint. Microsoft 365, which the company was already licensed for, included SharePoint Online. And on top of that, the company was paying a third party for a hosted SharePoint server, purely because that was how staff got the mapped-drive experience they needed. Cloud Drive Mapper let the company's sole IT manager retire the hosted server (and the temperamental VPN that came with it) using the SharePoint they already had. Net saving: over £12,000 a year, with the migration invisible enough to happen over the Christmas break.
We needed a solution that would provide a static drive letter to a group of folders from within SharePoint Online. Cloud Drive Mapper hit the spot bang on: speaking to sales pre-purchase, they said exactly what we wanted to hear, and it does exactly as promised.
Jon Sharrock, IT Manager, Shropshire Homes Ltd
The challenge: paying twice for the same thing
Shropshire Homes was in a position a lot of small and mid-sized organisations quietly find themselves in. They had Microsoft 365, which includes SharePoint Online storage. But SharePoint Online, in its native form, does not present itself as mapped drives, and the internal expectation was for mapped drives (unsurprisingly, since that is what every staff member had used for years). To close the gap, the company was paying a third-party managed service to host a SharePoint server that gave staff their mapped drives. Effectively, they were paying twice for the same platform: once through Microsoft, once through the third party. The arrangement worked, but it was expensive and increasingly outdated.
The VPN was the second cost. Staff working remotely connected through it to reach the hosted SharePoint server's drives, and it dropped often enough to become a running joke. Every drop generated help-desk work, and Jon Sharrock, the sole IT manager supporting 108 staff and contractors on his own, absorbed all of it. Every recurring subscription, and every user-frustration event, had an outsized impact on his workload.
The solution: cancel two subscriptions, install one piece of software
Cloud Drive Mapper does exactly what the hosted-SharePoint arrangement was doing, but against the SharePoint Online tenant Shropshire Homes already had. That single substitution retired both the hosted server and the VPN, in one step. After a demo confirmed CDM did what it said on the tin, licensing was agreed and the migration was scheduled for the Christmas break.
The rollout produced almost no visible disruption for staff. A small number of shortcuts and cross-workbook spreadsheet links needed updating, but for most of the team the change was invisible: they returned in the new year, opened the drive letter they were used to, and worked the way they always had. Integration with each user's Microsoft account handled authentication cleanly, so the sign-in model actually tightened as a byproduct: no more third-party server credentials, just the M365 identity every user already had.
We have managed to remove a hosted SharePoint server and VPN that was costing in excess of £12,000 per year, by simply installing a piece of software.
Jon Sharrock, IT Manager, Shropshire Homes Ltd
Results: two subscriptions cancelled, one security posture tightened
The hosted SharePoint server is gone. The VPN client is gone. The saving on those two line items alone exceeds £12,000 a year, and the second-order savings (Jon's time no longer spent troubleshooting VPN dropouts) come on top.
The security posture tightened at the same time as the cost dropped. Moving from a third-party-hosted SharePoint server (with its own credentials, its own patch cycle, its own attack surface) to CDM running against M365 directly means authentication is Microsoft-account-based, which is typically the more mature model in a small business. Staff get single sign-on. Everything they access is inside the M365 boundary they already understand.
Jon Sharrock's summary, from the case-study interview, captures the wider point about what CDM is doing in the market:
Cloud Drive Mapper is the easiest application to use, and configuration is as straightforward as it gets. I'm amazed Microsoft don't have this built in already, but IAM Cloud have filled the gap.
Jon Sharrock, IT Manager, Shropshire Homes Ltd
About Shropshire Homes Ltd
Shropshire Homes Ltd, based in Shrewsbury, has been building distinctive homes across Shropshire for more than 45 years. The company is known for converting prestigious, historic, listed and often sensitive buildings into luxury modern properties, and employs a team of approximately 108 professionals across construction, sales, administration and IT functions.
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Stop paying twice for SharePoint
Cloud Drive Mapper is free to trial for 30 days. If you are running an external SharePoint host or a legacy VPN to give staff mapped drives, this is the software that lets you cancel the extra bill.