What happened to the 'Share' pop up?
Hi, When I selected a file in OneDrive for Buiness (web) and clicked on 'Share' I used to get a window like: But today my users have started to report that they are only seeing: ...
Forum Discussion
Although that discusssion and the page that it links to (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/OneDrive-for-Business/A-Simpler-Sharing-Experience-on-OneDrive-for-Business/m-p/4817#M99) is all about the sharing of links.
They don't seem to mention the removal of the invite functionality?
The invite functionality has not been removed: in the new dialog choose the kind of link, fill the username and message fields and click on Share to send the invite.
- Yeap, this popup has been around for some weeks and the idea is to simplify the way you share documents with people
The issues are that:
- The messages about this change talked about "When selecting the “Email link”* or “Get a link” command for a file or folder the user will be presented with a simplified interface".
My users generally used the 'invite' option, not the share via link option. They may be the same under the surface but from the users point of view they used invite.
Now there is confusion over the difference between the 'share' option and the 'Get link' option.
I would have hoped that the announcement message about this change would have mentioned that the 'invite people' option was going to look so different. - To highten the confusion the share dialog that is triggered from the sharing option in the Details panel is still the old one that has the 'invite' option.
So selecting share from the '...' menu on a file opens up the new simplified UI with a different way of sending an invite type message, but selecting 'add people' under Sharing in the file details triggers the UI with the actual invite option. - The message stated that the rollout was expected to complete by mid September and the message was fully removed from the message centre at the end of September ... yet it only rolled out to us in mid Jan.
So by the time it arrived (3.5 months later) we had completely forgotten that the message ever existed. So it seems that we are going to have to start creating our own copies of all of the message centre contents.
Was this change listed on the Ofrfice 365 Roadmap, I couldn't spot it?
This "Simpler Sharing Experience" seems to have just created more confusion amongst our users here.
And thanks all for the help, I do appreciate it.
- StephenRice
Microsoft
Hi MatthewBrockway,
Thanks for all of your feedback below! Hopefully I can shed some light on the issues you've mentioned.
1) As we looked at the previous sharing experience, we found that one of the main causes of confusion in our sharing model was that we had tied the ability to "share via e-mail" (i.e. "I want to share a document and send the recipient an e-mail") with a requirement that you "invite" (i.e. I want to explicitly give User A access to the resource). With the new model, we wanted to separate these concepts. The idea is that the user first picks if they want to e-mail the resource to the user (Originally we called this e-mail a link but we settled back on 'share' based on user feedback) and then picks the type of link they want to share. By clicking the blue link in the new dialogue (lots of feedback that this link isn't discoverable so we'll be addressing this in a future update), the user can select the type of link they want: anyone with the link (e.g. anonymous access link), people in my organization (e.g. internal or company shareable link) or specific people (e.g. the old "invite" flow).
2. From talking with users, another insight we had was that users tend to fall into two "buckets" of thought. The majority of users think of "sharing" in what I think of was the "web" or "attachment" model which is something like "I want to send Document X to User A". The sharing dialog covers this case. The other type of user though thinks in the more classic SharePoint model which is "I want to add User A to the permission list of Document X". This is the "add people" flow in the Details pane. We want to make this flow easier as well in the future.
3. This one was our bad. We rolled the new sharing dialog out to first release last year and started gathering feedback (ex: whether the entry point was more understandable as "share" or "e-mail a link"). Unfortunately, we also discovered an issue around the new sharing dialog and the "Shared With Me" view. We had to pause rollout while we addressed this issue; I believe this is now fixed which is why we've resumed rolling the feature out.
We're continuing to iterate and evolve our sharing experiences and you should see the fruit of that labor later this year. If you have any other feedback on the new sharing dialog, please let me know and I'll make sure it gets circulated around the product team. Thanks!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
- Thanks for this detailed explanation. It will really helps when explaining changes in sharing to customers
- The messages about this change talked about "When selecting the “Email link”* or “Get a link” command for a file or folder the user will be presented with a simplified interface".
