SHAREPOINT - ONEDRIVE LINK USABILITY FIXED
- Jonathan Stuckey
- Mar 17
- 2 min read
Author: Jonathan Stuckey
Finally! Microsoft addresses one of the biggest pain-in-the-a**** with using OneDrive links from a SharePoint library - finding things grouped in alphabetical order... by site. Yep someone up there got the point and addressed this usability issue.
The problem with links
With roadmap update (MC1025216) Microsoft has addressed the Link naming conventions - and the headache they've caused.
As a user, the number one thing you don't want when going through folders (links) is endless scrolling ...and not knowing how to find the right Library you're supposed to use. Whether in the offline sync to Explorer view, or in the OneDrive browser UI, it's annoying, confusing and from information mgmt perspective down right irresponsible to force users into scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.... to find place to 'save' a document.
Problem fixed with a naming convention
Why haven't they done what we've been doing manually - by default ...Well now they have.
Yep, in the March update (MC1025216) Microsoft gave us a new naming convention order for folder shortcuts. It has made it so that the Site-name (or originating site) is first in the link structure... or to put it another way, you can group the libraries/folders you have connected to via OneDrive by the name of the location they are from.
The update applies across OneDrive for web, iOS/Android, File Explorer, Mac Finder, and Microsoft Teams - but only for new Links. Existing shortcuts remain unchanged.
If I want to see all my Marketing content, and which area I need to project files in (to the right project) - a naming convention that supports human brain pattern recognition behaviour will help!
Closing
Now if you want to see the difference on a small-scale, I've chucked-up a quick video showing the difference between old-school naming, and new naming convention....
But if you really want to get users to take advantage of the usability improvement, and help people save things in the right-place, take your users through unlinking and re-syncing their most used libraries. It will be worth it.
Caution:
What this change will do is show where your site naming is bad, inconsistent or just messy. If you let your users call a Microsoft Team, or SharePoint site whatever they want, this wont help you that much. Ironically, neither will search or Copilot. To get good results and improved usability consider doing a clean-up
Want to know more about SharePoint, usability and getting more from your environment? Give me a shout.
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Disclaimer
No Generative AI was used in the creation of this article. All content was created by author, based on released information from Microsoft. Any errors or issues with the content in this article are entirely the authors responsibility.
About the author: Jonathan Stuckey
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