Confusing Behavior with OneDrive Attachments

Brass Contributor

I recently closed out a service ticket with Office 365 support in which I was asking about confusion on behavior that I experience attaching OneDrive (for Business also) documents to emails. Support ultimate declared it "by design," but it seems odd to me. Here are a few related issues that encapsulate my confusion.

 

  1. The Recent Items list often contains identical files that are essentially duplicates. One points to the cloud file (https reference) and the other points to a local path reference.
  2. Many of the items in the Recent Items list are already in OneDrive, but the reference is to a local path and they are not identified with a cloud icon. Attaching any of these files results in their being downloaded (if they were cloud only via FilesOnDemand). One option is to "upload to OneDrive," but that seems silly since they are already in OneDrive.
  3. Selecting "Web Location" navigates to an old school WebDAV looking area of File Explorer. That works, but users are usually taught that the File Sync nodes are where they go for OneDrive files so it's super easy for a user to exit out of the WebDAV (or https) node and navigate to the File Sync nodes (they are staring right at them in File Explorer) and then that will attach a local copy.

Just as is the case with Outlook for the Web (or the Other Web Locations) behavior, I would expect Outlook to identify that the sync'd file also exists in the cloud and offer the option for a link or copy (That's how Settings > General is configured), but that's not the behavior that I experience. Local synced files are attached as copies without asking (even if they are cloud files).

 

I was surprised that support declared that "by design" and I can't find any definitive documentation on the behavior so I turn to the community. Any corroboration or insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

Andy

 

3 Replies

Andy, I've seen this behavior since I started using OneDrive/Outlook and never thought twice until I received some user feedback that this is confusing. Did you ever find a root cause or solution? We're going to open an incident with Microsoft to see if they have any suggestions.

Hi Daniel,

Did you get any feedback from your incident from Microsoft? We are having similar issues with a few of our users and attaching files from the OneDrive 'Synced' state throw errors?

Regards,

Michael
Hello Andy, this is one of the reason behind the Attach2Cloud product design.
The missing link between Outlook and OneDrive, with this product you can drag and drop files from your OneDrive local folder and attach them as a link without downloading them.
This is one in many features that are offering missing options like the way to upload attachments in subfolders of OneDrive from inside Outlook directly.

If you want to have a look, don't hesitate to ask for a fully functional evaluation version of Attach2Cloud and you could check by yourself all you can do with it.