Cloud Drive Mapper for construction

Construction work happens in more places than most industries. Head office, regional offices, live sites, portacabins, project war rooms, laptops in the back of vans. Files that people cannot reach in the right place at the right time slow down projects that cannot afford it. Cloud Drive Mapper brings real-time Microsoft 365 file access to every Windows environment across that landscape, with full support for the design and engineering software your teams already rely on, and without pulling gigabytes of drawings and project documents down to every device.

1.5M+ active users worldwide

~5,000 organisations run CDM

ISO 27001 certified since 2016

01

Real-time file access, office to site and back

Construction is a moving-parts industry. People are in the office one day, at a client meeting the next, on site the day after that. The files they need have to be the current version, not the version that was current before they left. The OneDrive sync client's eventual-consistency model is a poor fit for that reality.

Cloud Drive Mapper works in real time. It talks directly to Microsoft Graph on demand, so a drawing revised in the design office at 10am is available to the site engineer opening it on their laptop at 10.02am. No local mirror to reconcile, no propagation lag, no arguments over which version is the current one.

"Files always there in an instant" is the shorthand. Whether the team member is at their desk, in a client's boardroom, or a portacabin on site, the drive letter shows the same live view into Microsoft 365 that everyone else sees.

02

AutoCAD, Bluebeam and the rest of your design toolkit

Design and engineering software in construction is largely built around the assumption of a Windows file system with real drive letters. AutoCAD reads and writes to network paths. Bluebeam Revu opens, marks up and saves PDFs from mapped drives. Structural analysis packages, estimating tools, civils software, GIS applications, document management overlays, the vast majority expect a file path, not a cloud URI.

Cloud Drive Mapper presents Microsoft 365 storage as virtual network drives with real file paths. Every application that expects a Z: drive gets one. AutoCAD treats CDM-mapped drives the same way it treats a traditional file server. Bluebeam opens, marks up and saves back cleanly. Automated file-locking means that when one engineer has a drawing open, other users see the lock and cannot accidentally overwrite work in progress.

This matters because moving project storage into Microsoft 365 does not require a parallel programme of application remediation. The applications do not know they have moved.

Construction runs on CAD drawings and documents that people need to open locally, and a lot of our staff aren't IT people. Change is hard won. Cloud Drive Mapper let us keep the familiar mapped-drive experience, which buys us the time to move everyone towards the Microsoft way of working at a pace they can handle.
Marc Studer, Teamlead ECM, Marti Group

03

Enterprise-scale SharePoint and Teams for the whole practice

Microsoft 365 has become the standard collaboration backbone for construction firms: Teams for project rooms, SharePoint for document control and issued-for-construction packages, OneDrive for individual work.

A live project site with 80,000 drawings, marked-up PDFs, RFIs and submittals is a routine target for CDM. Teams file libraries with hundreds of thousands of items across the whole practice still open instantly. Scale that would defeat the sync client is unremarkable.

04

A fragmented office landscape unified into a single source of truth

Construction firms typically operate across multiple locations: head office, regional offices, joint-venture offices, site offices that spin up for a project and are torn down at handover. Traditionally, keeping the file store synchronised across that landscape meant per-site infrastructure, WAN links, DFS replication, and the associated maintenance overhead. Each new project office needed provisioning; each closed office needed decommissioning.

With Cloud Drive Mapper, SharePoint is the single source of truth for the whole practice. A new site office comes online with laptops and a router; CDM connects them to the same Microsoft 365 tenant as HQ. When the project completes and the cabin closes, there is nothing to migrate off, nothing to decommission. The content stays where it always was.

05

Retiring on-site file servers

Many construction firms still run one or more on-site file servers as the primary project store, often because earlier SharePoint migrations foundered on user-experience or application-compatibility issues. Cloud Drive Mapper removes both blockers. The move happens without changing how engineers, designers or project administrators open, save or search for files, because the drive letter stays the same.

The savings are direct: server hardware refresh cycles avoided, on-site backup infrastructure retired, disaster-recovery scope reduced, and WAN links serving only regional-office file access become optional.

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

Read the full Shropshire Homes case study →

06

Sub-contractor and joint-venture collaboration

Construction is a heavily sub-contracted industry, and major projects often involve joint ventures between two or more main contractors. Sharing project documents with sub-contractors and JV partners used to mean either extending file-server access (with all the security and offboarding headaches that entails) or emailing zipped drawing packs.

Microsoft 365 handles this natively through SharePoint's guest access model, with granular per-site or per-folder permissions, expiring links, and clean offboarding when a project ends. Cloud Drive Mapper does not change any of that: your permissions model is your permissions model. What CDM does add is that your own internal staff, using CDM, see the same drive letter experience they always have, while the external collaboration happens through the browser or the sub-contractor's own Microsoft 365 workflow.

07

Copilot-ready SharePoint content

Microsoft 365 Copilot only sees content that lives in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. As long as project documentation lives on an on-premises file server, Copilot cannot use it, no matter how well-organised the file server is.

Cloud Drive Mapper is what moves the content into a place Copilot can reach, without disrupting how the practice works. That converts a Copilot readiness project from a six-to-twelve-month change-management exercise into a matter of weeks. Adopting SharePoint and Teams for file storage is the main prerequisite for training Copilot to be genuinely useful across a construction business.

08

Familiar file experience for engineers, designers and site staff

Adoption costs money and time. A programme that requires engineers, designers and site administrators to relearn file workflows during live projects is a programme most construction CIOs will delay indefinitely rather than roll out during a busy framework.

Cloud Drive Mapper looks like a file server to the user. The Z: drive that was there for a decade is still there. Folders, files, shortcuts, inter-document links and drawing references keep working. From the user's point of view, nothing changed.

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Frequently asked questions

Which design and engineering packages work with Cloud Drive Mapper?

Any Windows application that expects a real drive letter or UNC path will work with Cloud Drive Mapper, because CDM presents Microsoft 365 storage as exactly that. This covers AutoCAD, Bluebeam Revu, and the wide range of general-purpose and industry-specific design, engineering and estimating packages used across construction.

Does Cloud Drive Mapper work on tablets or phones used on site?

No. CDM is a Windows product designed for site offices, HQ and remote-working laptops. For iOS or Android device access to the same SharePoint and OneDrive content, use Microsoft's own SharePoint and Teams mobile apps, which access the same underlying files. CDM handles the Windows workstation experience; mobile access happens via Microsoft's native mobile apps.

Does Cloud Drive Mapper work with patchy site connectivity?

Cloud Drive Mapper is a hybrid real-time and sync client, not a purely real-time one. In normal use it fetches and saves in real time against Microsoft 365. If connectivity drops while a user is working on a file, they can carry on editing, save cleanly, close the application and safely restart the machine: the changes queue locally and push back the moment connectivity returns. That distinguishes CDM from purely real-time drive-mappers where a mid-edit connection loss can prevent saving. Site offices with 4G/5G routers, portacabin-installed connections or Starlink work fine as a matter of course, and intermittent connectivity is handled transparently.

Can sub-contractors and joint-venture partners access our SharePoint via Cloud Drive Mapper?

External access is controlled entirely by your Microsoft 365 permissions, not by Cloud Drive Mapper. If you have granted a sub-contractor guest access to a specific SharePoint site, that guest can access it through the standard Microsoft experience in the browser or Teams. Cloud Drive Mapper itself is only for users in your own Microsoft 365 tenant, so guests can't use it. Most construction firms find the standard SharePoint external sharing model is enough for sub-contractor access, with CDM used by their own internal staff.

Do we need to move all our project data to SharePoint before Cloud Drive Mapper is useful?

No. Cloud Drive Mapper works with whatever content is already in Microsoft 365. Many firms roll out CDM alongside a phased migration off their on-site file servers, moving active project data first and leaving archived projects on the file server until they can be retired properly. The two workstreams run in parallel; CDM does not require a big-bang cutover.