Following a Document

Iron Contributor

Good Day

 

With the classic SharePoint UI in Team Sites we still had the ability in selecting a document in a Document Library and picking the option to Follow a Document.  It looks as you Follow a Document when using the Classic UI that the Newsfeed functionality is leveraged (something that looks at least partially deprecated).  If you are quick enough to click on the pop up notification you are following a document it then takes you to your OneDrive personal site, specifically to a Social/FollowedContent.aspx page.  That Follow content page is interestingly not visible as a navigation choice when going to my OneDrive personal site unless i also choose to switch back to the Classic OneDrive UI View.

The reason for this long introduction is because we are being asked by customers on how to Follow Documents in a SharePoint Communication Site.  It looks the only choice will be to switch the library to the Classic View to see the Follow option.  Does anyone know of another out of the box way of doing a document follow or if the Modern UI may support this in the future?

6 Replies
Unfortunately, modern SPO sites does not provide a builtin feature to follow documents so if you need this you have two options:
1) Go back to the classic experience
2) Develop a SPFx Extensios that provides this feature when selecting a document
I guess the real question is do they just want notified when documents change? or do they want a place for a summary of changes to documents they care about. Most people just want to be notified and in that case setting up alerts on a document is easy, but make sure if you do go this route to tell them to use the daily summary option :p. If you do changes as they happen, with the way auto save and office online save constantly you will end up with many alerts!
Thats is a very good point Alert VS Follow. For Documents, users want the Follow capability so they can bookmark those files they want to track. Users access applicable document libraries to pick and choose the files the want to "Follow". This is not the same as what Delve provides which focuses on your own work, or take a look at suggested documents or start clicking on colleagues to see if they have documents you want to follow/save for later/bookmark.

I would assume also that when it comes to Follow, we cannot follow a site or a whole list/library even if we leveraging the classic UI right? Thank you!
Agree, the idea with Delve is the search box for items you aren't or others rent actively working on that don't show up on the immediate popular docs board, you can search for any documents quickly that you have access too and add to your favorites, so I kind of looked at that as a way to follow documents.

Microsoft is working on a solution, we are just kind of in that transition phase where some things are missing that some folks rely on and need!

Could you get around this by creating a flow that does the same functionality?

Not really, unless they had a central document repository. Otherwise you would be creating a bunch of flows on a bunch of different libraries. If we had some form of Tenant wide Flow we could deploy then yes :).

Also would need to come up with some kind of feed or way to consume the follow updates etc.