Architecture

Zee Drive consists of 3 main components: a client component ZeeDrive.exe that runs on your computer, the Zee Drive activation cloud service, and your Microsoft 365 tenant (SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams).

The Zee Drive client maps your network drives on your computer. The configuration information about the mapped drives is stored in the Zee Drive activation service. The Zee Drive client communicates with Microsoft 365 to read and write your files.

Network Drive Publishing Process

Only the Zee Drive subscription administrators can create and manage the network drive mappings. When published, the drive mappings will push out automatically to all computers that are activated on the subscription.

Deployment

Zee Drive supports three deployment environments;

• Personal computers

• Hot desk computers

• Desktop servers

For personal computers, users activate the computers themselves with an activation code provided to them by the Zee Drive subscription administrator. A user can activate up to 3 computers with their activation code.

Hot desk computers and desktop servers are activated by the subscription administrators. A hot desk computer supports any user on the subscription, but only one user at a time. Desktop servers support multiple users and cover RDS, Citrix, RemoteApp and Azure VD environments.

To deploy Zee Drive, activate it on the target computer.

Operation

Zee Drive employs a Windows file system driver to broker file system events generated by the end user working on their files and the files residing in the Microsoft 365 cloud. Zee Drive translates Windows file events to Microsoft 365 file events.

The translation between file events on Windows and file events in the cloud is not one to one, and that's where the complexity lies with a network drive mapping tool like Zee Drive. The complexity is hidden from the end user by the tool.

A simplified flow of events can be seen below where the user saves a file in a Windows application ultimately resulting in the file being saved to the cloud.