OneDrive Sharing for Non-Techies

A non-techie colleague though he had shared one of his OneDrive folders with me. The link I got was in the form

file://computer_name/user_name/OneDrive/FileName

This is obviously a link to the computer itself. I got him on Lync and we shared his screen. Unsurprisingly he was having problems sharing any folder from OneDrive with anybody.

What was happening is he was (reasonably) thinking that “Share with” meant “Share with”, not “Assign permissions to the OneDrive placeholder folder on this specific machine”, which is what it actually does. That’s why I got the weird link. It wasn’t auto-generated like a regular sharing notification from OneDrive, he had generated it himself from Windows Explorer.

This is what he was doing.

The correct way to share is to click on OneDrive for Business > Share.

This will open up the browser, which will give you the familiar OneDrive “Share” dialog.

I feel that the “Share with” option should be removed from the OneDrive context menu and I’ve informed the Mother Ship of this. Just causes confusion in this modern age.