Forum Discussion
ODFB Sharing
Thanks Sal. I walked through both again and I think it now actually made sense to me, or at least I see the difference. However, it does seem like 'Get Link' is the "better" option and again, it does seem like this could be consolidated to one dialog box. Regardless, OD4B has gotten much better and now rivals (in my book) Drop Box in many ways. Thanks again!
Mark
MicrosoftWe consider that high praise Mark, thanks! :)
To give you another way of thinking about the "Share" and "Get a link" commands: When users share, they have three things we want them to think about it.
1) Who should be able to access the content?
This encompasses not only who the user is going to be sharing with but also who the user is comfortable with accessing it (for example, should the recipient be able to forward it?). This is all decided when the user picks the type of link (anonymous access, internal, or direct).
2) What should the recipient(s) be able to do?
This is what the recipient can do with the link? Can they edit? How long do they have access for? Pretty straightforward.
3) How will the recipient get the link?
This is the reason we have "Share" vs. "Copy link". Every person has a preferred way for communicating with their coworkers. To name a few: Outlook (Exchange), Outlook (Consumer), Gmail, Slack, Teams, SMS, Whatsapp, Skype for Business, Skype (consumer), IRC, morse code (okay, probably not). For some of these products (i.e. the Microsoft ones), we can do some cool integrations with OneDrive and SharePoint to make sharing seamless (try pasting a link into the Outlook web app and see what happens). But for all those cases where we can't do cool stuff, we give users the "Get a link" option so they can send with their preferred method. Other times, we know users don't care ("I just need Mark to get this document") so we give them the "Share" command as a fast way to send e-mail (the most universal method of communicating in business).
Now, the fact that all of our options are kind of separated into different dialogues is a quirk of our current UI experience. And that's something that's going to be changing very soon... In fact, keep an eye on message center today and tomorrow ;)