Actually with modern clouds like OneDrive it's not about files at all, I haven't seen network drives being used for a decade. It's about privileges to various resources available within the corporate network and about what you can't do with your work computer, and about having the computer auto-configure to play with all the resources on corporate network.
Stuff like - I open my computer and I immediately see the printer that's nearest to me as the first printer in the list. Access to it is authenticated and authorized (with no additional password prompts). I can simply choose a document from SharePoint and send it right there, walk over there and slap my chip card on it and have it printed. It's part of my system's print queue.
I scan a document and it goes directly to my OneDrive which is automatically connected to whatever computer I sit at as soon as I log in, regardless of me using a random terminal that's been sitting in whatever office I'm visiting.
I'm unable to break anything because there is no root to login to, nobody ever uses sudo on the computer, nobody ever needs admin privileges on it (harder to do with devs but common for all other professions). If an app needs to be added the computer is remotely reimaged from an image with the app added (this requires a one-setting change by the admin, nothing else). No user settings or files go missing in the process.
Corporate VPN, firewall, proxy servers, wifi network, wired network - all of it is uses auth and it just takes my user and just works with it. Nothing is available without auth.
Building this kind of system with Microsoft products is as easy as installing a few apps on the corporate server machine. Building it with Linux - well I am pretty skilled with Linux admin but I can't even imagine where to begin.
As for Samba, Gnome has good client built in to the file browser. But I'd have to ask why you're using Samba at all. There are much better network filesystems in the Linux world that don't come with all the legacy cruft and undocumented idiosyncrasies that are part of the SMB protocol. They're harder to set up on Windows, but that shouldn't be a problem if you standardize on Linux.