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Jack_Eidsmsness's avatar
Jack_Eidsmsness
Brass Contributor
Jul 28, 2025

Suggestion: URL scheme for onedrive synced locations

For a sharepoint site on the web, URLs are straightforward

 

https:// ENTERPRISETENANT .sharepoint.com/sites/ SITENAME / LIBRARY

 

Right now, if you need to coach someone through using a file in a way that requires syncing a folder, it's just a little too difficult.  In the interest of making it more possible for coworkers to provide practical instructions to each other, we would really benefit from having a way to link files the implies use of an existing sync or onedrive shortcut, and which falls back to suggest creating a new one.

 

Currently, we have to hope that our colleagues are using sharepoint site syncing the way that we hope they are, if we want to provide really specific context for things.

 

e.g. If my relative path is %USERPROFILE%/My Enterprise Tenant name/SITENAME - Documents/project1

someone else's could be 

%USERPROFILE%/My Enterprise Tenant name/SITENAME - project1

 

OR 

%USERPROFILE%/OneDrive - My Enterprise Tenant name/Documents/project1

OR

%USERPROFILE%/OneDrive - My Enterprise Tenant name/project1

 

 

Suppose we had new updates of OneDrive that set up a URL scheme that gets attached to an executable interpreter, and the interpreter takes what are otherwise the elements of an absolute https URL, but instead of opening a browser, it would compare it against the locally synced path (i.e. information from the "Accounts" settings).  If there's a match, it could then link to a location on disk (probably via some kind of consent screen as an intermediate):

 

-x-ms-onedrivesync://ENTERPRISETENANT.sharepoint.com/sites/SITENAME/LIBRARY/PATH/

 

If the URL is not represented among the onedrive folders that are synced, so far, then onedrive could propose that the user start syncing this folder, instead.

 

I really prefer the idea of treating a "onedrive shortcut" and a "sync" folder the same, as long as it's for an equivalent location in the cloud. This got really confusing to explain to people, once the "shortcut" feature was introduced.

 

Please? It would make things a lot easier. 


Does anything like this already exist? Is there a tool or a best practice that IT support at "work or school" organizations are already using to explain and talk about such things?

 

 

 

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