Editing non-Office files directly from SharePoint Server?

Hi Paul and thank you for your reply!

Ah, so it's the URI Scheme linking concept that enables there to be an active connection between SharePoint (On-prem in this case) and Office applications?

Editing with 3rd party apps straight from SharePoint

But 3rd party applications can also have an active edit connection to SharePoint, when you open their associated files from a SharePoint list.

For example, I have a drawing application called XMind 8 here, and if I click an .xmind file in a SharePoint 2016 list in IE or Edge in IE mode, then it opens the XMind application in Windows and I can save my changes straight to SharePoint. Note that check-in/out, if required, is not automatically done though, but that's easily manually done by users.

Questions

This leads to my nerd-curious questions/reflections: firstly, why does it work with XMind in IE? Do you think it's using a URI scheme? And secondly, why does it NOT work in Edge? Maybe it's the tighter security in Edge?

The local file problem

And as you say, the temporary local files that are generated if you don't have an active "edit link" to SharePoint is a problem, since many users don't even realize that the file was downloaded and then opened. And then they wonder why their changes aren't saved to SharePoint... 😞

Workaround

Anyway, a pretty good workaround for all 3rd party applications is to open the SharePoint sites in Explorer View; from there you can easily open the files in the 3rd party apps, while still saving directly to SharePoint. (Even with IE removed, you can just paste the SharePoint URL in a Windows Explorer window to get the WebDAV connection to an On-prem SharePoint.)