At Microsoft Tech Summt DC, I led a deep dive presentation on OneDrive for Business. A question that came up which I wanted to research more was around shared documents: if a shared document is moved or renamed, do the shared URLs continue to work? In SharePoint 2016, Microsoft added Durable Links, which enable users to share a document with the knowledge that moving or renaming it won’t break someone’s bookmarked link to it.
Technically, Durable Link works using a unique ID assigned to a document. The Document ID is included in the URL shared to other people, allowing the physical location to not matter; It provides an abstract between the physical structure of your sites and libraries and the ability to load a document.
This is important in OneDrive because, simply put, OneDrive is just another interface for SharePoint, geared towards the individual. The content owner can simply turn on Durable Links and the problem of orphaned links is a thing of the past. Mostly.
For full details, check out the full post over at the AvePoint Blog.
One other downside. The link does not refer back to the physical address. So if you have the link you cannot follow back which folder a document came from.
Sometime it is nice to know where a group of documents are being held, but you have to open the fil with the document id and then see where it was saved.
Completely agreed – I have used that trick for years, backtracking up to the folder in a URL to see what else is stored in there. This little shortcut does get hobbled with Durable Links. While that one is less obnoxious, I wish they would enable this to work across site collections, as well. In my mind, it should be as simple as placing a reference to the new site collection in the source, and the source site collection in the destination. A little extra storage and a little messy, but should be easy, no?