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Faculty, staff, and students who were at UConn prior to 2023 are likely familiar with the P Drive and the Q Drive. These drives are different than OneDrive SharePoint because they existed on campus. In the UConn datacenters, there were specialized computers, full of hard drives, that acted as personal and shared storage . These specialized computers acted as network-file-shares, or “NFS”. Whenever a user (the P and Q Drives respectively). Whenever someone signed into a university computer on campus, that computer would reach out and connect to your NFS so your files were always available to youto the datacenter and link them with their files. This allowed users to begin their work on one computer, and then continue their work on another.
However due to the nature of these computers files and the ecosystem they lived in, they could not feasibly adapt to the changing workplace. These NFS files were physically on campus, and you needed to be on campus in order to access them. Or, users could use a VPN (virtual private network) to have their computer behave as if it were on campus. In the case of the P Drive, users could not share files with each other, they could only make copies of the file to send to one another. If you needed to share a document from your P Drive, you could have either sent it to your coworker and have them send it back when they were done, or you could have copied the file and sent the copy to them. However, this copy would be totally independent from the original file.
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