Forum Discussion
Sharing a Shortcut and Hyperlink in File Explorer
Mapping a SharePoint drive locally often involves assigning it a drive letter locally on that specific engineers desktop so I suspect you'd need to ensure that any library is mapped identically for all team members. Additionally mapping a network drive to a SharePoint used to use the WebDAV protocol, which can be very flaky with SharePoint. It's known to time our every 8 hours or so and would need to constantly be reconnected, (although I'll be honest I don't know if this still the case). I suspect this would be a point of frustration for a team of IT literate engineers. I've tried generating a File Explorer window from SharePoint and it gave me a similar pathway and format to the on you've provided in your post.
An alternative might be exploring the OneDrive Sync agent. This is a desktop extension that allows you to sync content from both OneDrive and SharePoint Online. A brief summary of what it does is to duplicate the existing file structure within your library BUT presents it within a desktop explorer window. In Win-7 you can see this added to the desktop favourites. In Win-10 a brand new shortcut to SharePoint content and another to OneDrive content are created. The sync element refers to push / pull mechanics that will make changes available to others once a file has been saved and closed.
This affords you the chance to bypass using the browser entirely whilst benefiting from the collaborative side of SharePoint within a local desktop window.
Hope that make sense but please let me know if you've any questions.
Steven Andrews Thanks for the reply. I should have said we are using the SharePoint folders "Sync'ed" with via the OneDrive client, not via mapping the https address - as you said this is horribly flaky and I realise it's not really supported in a production environment.
We have these locations Sync'ed, and I need a way for our users to create and share shortcuts to these folders.
It may not be exactly what you're after but on the desktop sync, right clicking any item or folder will grant access to the Share options. It'll be indicated with the blue cloud. You can generate links for folders and items in this fashion.
I'm not terribly confident it'll be useful as each share option generates its own unique link and I'm interpreting what you're after as being similar to a unc path or somesuch.
I'll have a look on my set-up tomorrow at the office and will see if I can come up with anything more practical.
- This 'Share' method pushes users into a browser, and doesn't actually take them to the location in File Explorer.
Another use case for these shortcuts is file paths in shared applications: e.g. having a path built into an excel macro-based document, which multiple people use. Currently we have say
dbPath = "U:\Work\Engineering\appdb.sqlite" and multiple people interact with this excel document, and they need to have a path that is valid for everyone.If anyone does come looking here, it appears there isn't a solution to this. It's currently breaking a few applications for us, and I honestly have no idea how other companies haven't had a similar issue.
Crux of it, cloud migration failed for us. Going to have to stay old-school with local files and good ol' network shares.
