Remove "Add shortcut to OneDrive" from Sharepoint Sites

[RanchoJack]

We have our users want to use the 'Sync' and not the 'shortcut to OneDrive' for file on the Sharepoint sites.  

I was able to run from powershell:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Set-SPOTenant -DisableAddShortcutsToOneDrive $True
WARNING: Users in your organization will no longer be able to add new shortcuts to their OneDrive while the feature is in Public Preview. However, existing shortcuts will remain functional.

Which is exactly what we want but... It persists.

Any help on removing this from the sites?

[#2]

But it looks like the files are deleted that were synced and I'm afraid that the files will be deleted. Do we know if that is the case?

[#3]

this didn't work for me the first few times either. tried a week later and it worked....?

use the following:

Connect-SPOService "https://domain-admin.sharepoint.com"

Set-SPOTenant -DisableAddShortCutsToOneDrive $True

you can use "Get-SPOTenant" to see if it has worked - the parameter is actually listed as "DisableAddToOneDrive", but using this parameter doesn't work (you have to use the one listed above)

I wanted this disabled, as over the last year a couple of users have "somehow" deleted the whole sharepoint document library, and I'm pretty sure it's something to do with this shortcut (as discussed in below article)

 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/deleting-a-sharepoint-shortcut-to-onedrive/c5...

[#4]

@RanchoJack 

Hi
I had the same problem that this command was not chancing anything. I resolved it by running:
Update-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell

After that I run the command again: Set-SPOTenant -DisableAddShortcutsToOneDrive $True
Now it worked within few seconds :)

[#5]

@RanchoJack totally agree. This "Add shortcut to OneDrive" is a deadly feature as it stops syncing already synced SharePoint Onlines sites without users knowing. I cannot believe Microsoft would roll out some out like this. I had a few users who kept working in their local copy of SharePoint Online site thinking they are connected, but they had inadvertently also added a folder or two from SharePoint Online to their OneDrive using this "Add shortcut to OneDrive" button. When you later find this out, and try to sync the SharePoint Online library, you cannot do that either because OneDrive app would say: cannot sync. 

[#6]

@TechThatworks

Hello!
I had a question that hopefully you can help me answer. After removing this function from your SharePoint Online Tenant, do you know if this also removed the function from OneDrive to "Add a shortcut to my files" for folders that are Shared from one OneDrive to another?

I do not believe that this function should be removed, but I haven't been able to find anything online about it. This is the last thing we need to figure out before we can move forward with removing "Add a shortcut to OneDrive" from SharePoint.

[#7]

I have totally gone 180 on this. Add Shortcut to OneDrive has the following benefits over Sync which took me a while to realise:

 Deleting shortcuts from your OneDrive does not delete shared files within Teams channels or SharePoint Online sites so all shared files are safe.
 You can keep all your Teams channels and SharePoint Online sites in one place using File Explorer.
 Moving to another PC will only require you to sign-in to your OneDrive account and all your shortcuts will be intact.

[#8]

@MichaelDelpach 

I agree that the experience is better IF they only every try to sync that one location.
The problem comes in that they don't understand that syncing Folder C from folder A > B > C means that they now can't sync B or A.

What would be ideal (to my mind) would be something like folder
C added as shortcut, and try to add folder B or A, and so the client just moves everything and includes the NEW whole filepath requested - and B (and C) or A (and B>C are all synced at the highest requested folder level synced.

Right now, if you add Shortcuts to the OneDrive, it also prevents SharePoint sites showing up as separate entries, which I feel is a MUCH cleaner experience for the users to FIND the files and understand where they are saved into. 

For Example last week I had users who didn't understand why everything was saved "into their OneDrive" but "copies" were "also saved in" the SharePoint sites. 
They were trying to CLEAN UP the "Extra" OneDrive copies! 

These of course weren't ACTUALLY copies or extra, but they had SHORTCUTS INTO the SharePoint sites, and were actively deleting important files and causing chaos in their organization. 

The versioning systems let us restore things fine, but they had no idea the shortcuts were linking things. 
Cleared out the shortcuts, and set them up with separately synced libraries and now it was obvious WHERE things were stored! 

[#9]

This is so true. I'm very often seeing people with shortcuts in their OneDrive and they don't even know how it got there. And like someone else said in the thread, when you try to delete that shortcut, sometimes the "Delete shortcut" in Explorer does nothing, and other times deleting the shortcut deletes everything that shortcut leads to. It happened to me at least twice where I had to restore a whole Team from the bin.

I am currently in the process of disabling Teams sync for all my clients (keeping just their OneDrive). So far so good, but I now need to remove both the Sync and Add shortcut to OneDrive buttons. Microsoft sure ain't making it easy for people who want to go 100% cloud only with no sync.