Problem
Consider this scenario:
My organisation has been using Microsoft 365 for several years now - we started when it was still called Business Productivity Office Suite (BPOS). We've recently been informed that the SharePoint sites that were created during the BPOS days need the URL's renaming to *.sharepoint.com (see the link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3053838) for more details.
The migration has been going fine (we've done 6 out of 7 sites) however the last one may be a stinker - the problem is, the users have been using the SharePoint site as a OneNote sync repository, so all the OneNote documents are stored on the SharePoint site so they are shared with everyone within the department.
The issue I need help with is this: When I change the URL of this particular SharePoint site, the URL's for the OneNote items will change - this isn't difficult to change within OneNote as you can just point the existing OneNote to the new location, but what happens then when it comes to synchronisation? Will OneNote then believe all items within the new URL need synching and therefore download everything again to the PC?
With a limited bandwidth at the office and over 1gb of documents within the OneNote that will then result in a huge amount of data being downloaded many times over - but as (a) renaming the URL affects everyone at the same time and (b) this change will be forced upon us anyway come January we're going to have to bite the bullet and do it.
Any advice would be really helpful. We are using OneNote 2013 and Office 365 Enterprise E3.
Solution
Your Notebooks in OneNote will go offline if you change the notebooks URLs in SharePoint Online. And you'll get the error message like"we can't sync the notebook because you're offline or because the network location is unavailable".
You need to open the Notebooks with the new locations. Since you have over 1GB of Notebooks and this will put a high pressure on the bandwidth of your organization, I suggest you let the users to close the notebooks and to open them in the new locations in batches. If there are lots of new documents created in the Notebooks, you can also let them to go to SharePoint Online for the daily works before the process of syncing Notebooks with the new locations.
