Architecture
ZeeDrive 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 ZeeDrive client maps your network drives on your computer. The configuration information about the mapped drives is stored in the ZeeDrive activation service. The ZeeDrive client communicates with Microsoft 365 to read and write your files.
Network Drive Publishing Process
Only the ZeeDrive 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
ZeeDrive supports three deployment environments;
For personal computers, users activate the computers themselves with an activation code provided to them by the ZeeDrive 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 ZeeDrive, activate it on the target computer.
Licences
ZeeDrive offers three types of licences;
Personal Computer User
Shared Computer User
Shared Computer
These three licences cover the three deployment scenarios supported by ZeeDrive.
For users with a personal computer, they are assigned a Personal Computer User licence. This provides the user with an activation code which they can use to activate up to three computers. A user with a Personal Computer User licence assigned can also use ZeeDrive on computers activated as hot desk computers and desktop servers.
Hot desk computers and desktop servers require the Shared Computer licence. A hot desk computer requires a single Shared Computer licence, whereas a desktop server requires a pool of Shared Computer licences.
Users that don't need ZeeDrive on a personal computer, but will be using ZeeDrive on a hot desk computer or desktop server, are assigned a Shared Computer User licence.
For more information, see Pricing.
Operation
ZeeDrive 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. ZeeDrive 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 ZeeDrive. 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.
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