Can you still map a network drive with SharePoint?

There is a way to map a drive letter to SharePoint, and it is fragile enough that it is rarely the right answer. The better option is syncing the libraries people need, which puts them in File Explorer beside OneDrive, keeps the familiar feel and behaves properly offline.

The request behind this question is almost never really about drive letters. It is that staff have used a mapped drive for fifteen years, know exactly where everything is, and do not want to work in a browser. That is a completely reasonable thing to want, and the good news is that nothing about SharePoint requires people to live in a browser.

Syncing gives you the familiar shape. The library appears in File Explorer, files open in the desktop applications, saving works as it always did, and version history and permissions carry on quietly underneath. Configured with Files On-Demand, everything is visible while only what people actually open is downloaded, so a large library costs almost nothing in local storage until it is used. That last setting is the difference between sync being invisible and someone filling a laptop drive.

Two things to plan for. Sync the libraries people genuinely need rather than everything, because a synced copy of the entire tenant is neither useful nor fast. And identify any line-of-business application that insists on a drive letter before the file server goes, since some older software does, and that constraint is much easier to design around in planning than to discover afterwards. If you want sync set up so it feels like the old drive without behaving like one, call 1800 456 567.