Cloud Drive Mapper for education

Education sets the hardest IT problems anywhere, on the tightest budgets. Thousands of users with heavy year-on-year churn. Shared workstations in labs, libraries and classrooms. Mixed-device estates spanning teacher laptops, admin PCs, student Chromebooks and BYOD tablets. Cloud Drive Mapper is the Microsoft 365 file layer built for that reality: real-time access on and off site, a small cache that behaves on low-spec hardware, education-specific pricing, and a familiar drive-letter experience that does not force teachers to relearn how they work.

1.5M+ active users worldwide

~5,000 organisations run CDM

ISO 27001 certified since 2016

01

Real-time file access on and off site

Teachers plan lessons at home, deliver them in the classroom, mark them in a coffee shop, and expect the file they saved on Sunday evening to be the file they open on Monday morning. Students move between school desktops, home laptops, and shared devices in the library. The OneDrive sync client's eventual-consistency model produces the classic "which version is the current one?" question that everyone in education has lived through at least once.

Cloud Drive Mapper works in real time. It talks directly to Microsoft Graph on demand, so files are always the current version regardless of where or when they were last edited. Files always there in an instant, on and off site, on any Windows device the user signs into.

02

Direct saves so uploads do not get cut off when a class ends

A recurring problem with the OneDrive sync client in schools: a pupil saves a piece of coursework at the end of a lesson, logs off, and walks out. The sync client had queued the upload but not yet completed it. The work is lost. The teacher has to explain to a fifteen-year-old, again, that this is how the software works.

Cloud Drive Mapper's direct-access, direct-save model behaves differently. When a file is saved, it goes straight to Microsoft 365 through the Graph API. Upload status is visible to the user in real time. If the upload is still in progress when the bell goes, the user sees it, rather than assuming the file is safely saved.

03

Full compatibility with the software education actually uses

Schools and universities run a long tail of software that expects a Windows drive letter or UNC path. Subject-specific teaching packages, exam-marking software, GIS, CAD for design and technology, composition software, statistical packages, virtual-lab environments, MIS export tools, timetabling software, and hundreds more.

Cloud Drive Mapper presents Microsoft 365 storage as virtual network drives with real file paths. Every application that expects a Z: drive gets one. If it works with a Windows file server, it works with CDM.

04

Small cache footprint for shared lab and library workstations

School and university workstations are often shared: a computer lab, a library terminal, a classroom teacher- station, a reception PC. Devices are frequently low-spec, old, or budget-constrained. The OneDrive sync client's large local cache consumes disk aggressively; on a shared workstation that several dozen users log into during the week, disk fills up fast.

Cloud Drive Mapper uses a tiny self-managing cache. Content is streamed from Microsoft 365 to the device at the moment a user opens it, and released when they close it. Small hard drives stay usable. Multi-user machines do not accumulate everyone's OneDrive data. Startup times stay fast.

05

Enterprise-scale SharePoint and Teams for teaching and learning

Microsoft 365 for Education has become the collaboration backbone in most schools and universities. Where the OneDrive sync client falls over at scale (large class libraries, shared computers, non-persistent lab environments), Cloud Drive Mapper keeps the collaboration model working.

A department with 50,000 teaching resources in a SharePoint site can still browse it as a drive letter. A Teams site for a cohort of 400 students with a shared assignment folder opens instantly. Scale that would defeat the sync client is unremarkable.

06

Retiring on-site file servers

Many schools, universities and MATs still run one or more on-site file servers as their primary teaching-resource store, often because earlier attempts to migrate to SharePoint foundered on user-experience or application- compatibility issues. Cloud Drive Mapper removes both blockers. The move can happen without changing how teachers, students or admin staff open, save or search for files, because the drive letter stays the same.

For education IT budgets specifically, this matters: server hardware refresh cycles avoided, on-site backup infrastructure retired, disaster-recovery scope reduced, and one fewer thing for the site's small IT team to look after. Once the file server is decommissioned, the SharePoint content also becomes usable by Microsoft 365 Copilot.

By moving away from the traditional model of continually expanding and replacing on-premise file servers, Cloud Drive Mapper has helped us avoid thousands of pounds of infrastructure expenditure while giving us a far more flexible solution.
Vince Henley-Stocks, IT Manager, The Wilnecote School

07

Copilot-ready SharePoint content

Microsoft 365 Copilot only sees content that lives in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. As long as teaching resources and school documentation live on an on-premises file server, Copilot cannot use them.

Cloud Drive Mapper is what moves the content into a place Copilot can reach, without disrupting how staff and students work. That converts a Copilot readiness project from a months-long change-management exercise into a matter of weeks. Adopting SharePoint and Teams for file storage is the main prerequisite for Copilot to be genuinely useful across a school, college or university.

08

Familiar file experience for teachers, students and IT staff

Adoption costs money, time and goodwill. A programme that requires teaching staff to learn new file workflows during a term is a programme most heads of IT will delay indefinitely rather than roll out mid-year.

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 and inter-document links open the way they always have. From the user's point of view, nothing changed.

CDM fills in the gaps that Microsoft leaves in transitioning to a modern workplace.
Daan Rousseau, Karel de Grote Hogeschool

09

Priced for education, from the smallest school to the largest MAT

Cloud Drive Mapper has dedicated Education pricing tiers. School-type buckets (primary, middle, secondary) for individual institutions, plus per-user bands as user counts scale up. Multi-Academy Trusts, US school districts, and education groups have a bespoke pricing conversation with our team, because the shapes vary too much for a fixed tier to fit fairly.

The pricing calculator has the individual-institution figures in GBP, EUR, USD and AUD. For MAT / district / group conversations, get in touch and we will work through it with you.

Start a 30-day free trial See education pricing →

Frequently asked questions

Does Cloud Drive Mapper work on Chromebooks or student iPads?

No. Cloud Drive Mapper is a Windows product, so it covers the Windows portion of your device estate: staff laptops, admin machines, library and lab PCs, teacher workstations. Chromebook and iPad users continue to access the same SharePoint and OneDrive content through Microsoft's own web experience and mobile apps, which are well-optimised for those devices. In practice most schools and universities use CDM alongside those other clients, not instead of them.

What is the pricing for schools, and are there discounts for MATs, districts and education groups?

Cloud Drive Mapper has dedicated Education pricing tiers with school-type buckets for primary, middle and secondary schools, plus per-user bands for larger institutions. Multi-Academy Trusts, US school districts and education groups have a bespoke pricing conversation with our team. The pricing calculator has the details.

What happens when a pupil or student takes a laptop home and the connection drops?

Cloud Drive Mapper is a hybrid real-time and sync client. In normal use it fetches and saves in real time. If connectivity drops while a user is working on a file, they can continue editing, save cleanly, close the application and safely restart the machine; 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.

How does Cloud Drive Mapper handle year-on-year user churn as pupils and students join and leave?

Access to files is controlled by Microsoft 365 permissions and by group membership in Entra ID or your MIS integration, exactly as it would be without CDM. When a user leaves and their Microsoft 365 account is disabled or removed, their CDM access ends with it. There is no separate CDM user database to keep in sync.

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

No. Cloud Drive Mapper works with whatever content is already in Microsoft 365. Many schools and MATs deploy CDM alongside a phased migration off their on-site file servers, moving active teaching resources and shared drives first and leaving archives on the file server until they can be retired properly.