Can you create a shortcut from a file in SharePoint to another folder in SharePoint?

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Posted on by EricSara77

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone out there has a solution to this one for me.

In our organisation, we have a folder in SharePoint for each customer. Within this folder are sub-folders of a very specific structure that hold lots of files. Some of these files we want to share with the client. The way we are doing this is that we have one folder called Shared and we share this with them. Now they can see anything we add to that folder. However, we want to keep the files in our structure and share them with the client without giving the client access to the folders where the file is. While we could share the file, we also want a place where they can see all the files we have shared with them, hence the Shared Folder. To achieve this, we right-click the file we want to share and send a shortcut to the Shared folder. Magic - The client can now see the shared files and does not have access to the folder where they live, and we can all collaborate and access them.

I would like to be able to create the shortcut via Power Automate. So the question is...

Does anyone know if you can create a shortcut from a file in SharePoint to another folder in SharePoint?

Thanks

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Andrew_J 1,962 Moderator on at

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@EricSara77

I am probably going to get this horibly wrong but I will start anyway.

I am sure you have many hundreds of folders from many different clients so how about managing this all through a SP List. The SP list could set up a SP site per customer. Each customer site would then have a SP List that would control the provision of the document per project. The libraries could then have the folder permsions set by the second SP List by say adding your customers email address to a people column. If an existing cleint has a new team member join thair team then a simple update in the SP List for that cleint could add that users permision ot that site. The only issue is transfering all the old data to the new structure but the process would be simpler in my opinion.

However despite the above I am not realy understanding the Shortcut issue what do you want it do other than create the file and put it somewhere. Once in the location how do we modifiy it.

I am sure you are not goign to like my idea but it may save the issue with the shortcut.

Regards,

Andrew

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EricSara77 61 on at

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Hi Andrew,
All ideas are welcome. Thanks for adding them.
The reason for creating a shortcut and not putting the file directly in the shared folder is that the team in our organisation (around 200) knows where the files are based on the folder structure. So let's say we have a file called Document.doc. and we have this in Client/Project/Plan Phase/Document.doc. We also have files in this folder that the client should not see. But this file we want them to see and have us and them edit it. So we share the file with the client (we don't send an email advising them of the share), and then we send a shortcut of the file to the Shared Folder (as in the folder is called "Shared" and it is also shared with the client. The client can now go into this Shared folder and see the shortcut. They click on it, and because the original file is shared with them, it opens, and we can all edit.
I hope this added clarity.

So back to your idea. Even if we had an SP list for each client, we still want the same file referenced from its master location (Client/Project/Plan Phase in the example above) and also from the list that the client can see. So we would still need to send a shortcut to this list.

Cheers,

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Andrew_J 1,962 Moderator on at

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@EricSara77

Great you liked the possible ideas so what about having the following

Client/Project

Then below that having two folders:

Plan Phase
Shared

All files for sharing go into the the shared and get share with the cleint.

It seems a lot easier to manange with your 200 users, and having hundreds of shortcuts of no more than 1Kb. The users in your company know to work on cleint shared files in the shared folder. And depending upon how critical it is you could setup a flow to tell the cleint the file has been updated on predetermined time period like every 15 minutes. It would check all files that were modified in that period and send an email to them from a shared email account so your users accounts did not get bult up with loads of emails.

However if you had the following:

SP Site Per Client
Doc Library Project
Shared
Shared folder for each cleint project
Other folders your use only NO cleint access

It may reduce the folder structure that I see is building up and save all the shortcuts.

With regard the shortcuts I have found the follwoing:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Power-Automate/Creating-Folder-Shortcut/td-p/870792

Regards,

Andrew

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EricSara77 61 on at

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Thanks, Andrew, for the ideas.
I ended up working out how I could do this.
I created a shared link of the file.
I used the Create File action and passed through a compose with
[InternetShortcut]
URL=
Where after the URL I put the shared link.

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