Announced for quite some time and postponed again: Moving OneDrive shortcuts. Until now, it was not possible to move shortcuts in the browser. All shortcuts were always inserted in the root directory in OneDrive for Business. This is not practical for everyone and had to be explained to users first, namely if the shortcut has its origin in a SharePoint document library. Trainers have to rethink, because OneDrive for Business is no longer my business workspace. The easiest bridge is the old Windows shortcuts, which could also have their origin anywhere. Many users also don’t know that you can rename these shortcuts without also renaming the source directory. That’s why I always renamed my shortcuts and put a „_“ in front of the shortcut name. Then all shortcuts are always at the beginning of OneDrive. The result looks like this:

So, like you, I am waiting for the possibility to move such shortcuts. And in the image above, I have already created a folder to hold all the shortcuts in my case. You don’t have to do that. You can also add them to an existing folder. Just as you wish. However you (want to) work. How it will look like then?

The two shortcuts are no longer visible. Only a click on the first folder shows us that the shortcuts have been moved correctly.

Trick

Did I cheat now? Not at all. Because what we are waiting for is the possibility to do the whole thing in the browser. And that is not possible at the moment (03/07/2022). I have also not applied any image montage. The folders are really moved. If you try it in the browser, you will have no luck. But I have of course synced my OneDrive for Business to my device(s). And a move in Windows Explorer works.
But beware: Explorer allows more than we expect.

Do not do

One thing they should definitely not do: Moving Add to OneDrive shortcuts beyond OneDrive for Business. OneDrive for Business is a SharePoint Site Collection. And this Site Collection cannot be moved to another SharePoint Site Collection. If you try anyway, you will get the following error message:

Wait

I don’t know how Microsoft will implement this in Windows 10. But the engineers will implement it properly. If you think about the different ring system in Windows and OneDrive, you can imagine that this could take quite some time. Not to mention. When we move a shortcut, all the meta data behind the shortcut has to be moved along with it. So OneDrive history data.

And here’s a two animations that show us how that will work in the browser:

Here we also see what problem comes to the user. Because the other users of the shared folder have no access to this moved folder.

Summary

Let’s still give Microsoft the time to secure the trouble spots. Because nothing is more important than the security of the data wherever they are in the OneDrive for Business cloud.