SharePoint’s Send to Location Feature is Gone! (So now what?) [How-to]

“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” Joni Mitchell sang in her 1970 hit song “Big Yellow Taxi.” Now, Joni wasn’t singing about the Send to Location feature in SharePoint, but she might as well have been…

bigstock-Taxi-2254233.png

That’s right, folks. The days of being able to publish a major version of a file and then simply link to its location elsewhere on your SharePoint site are gone. We at Code A Site found the Send to Location feature especially useful for tracking our budgeting (classic Revenues vs. Expenses graph). We had a simple graph setup on our main SharePoint site for all employees to view, but behind the scenes it was actually linked to a complex, frequently updated, and highly moderated series of financial Excel documents using the Send to Location option.

Other organizations we have worked with found the Send to Location option a helpful way to let employees without various levels of permissions access and edit files outside of their primary location. It was a helpful feature that really showed off the strengths of SharePoint: cloud-based collaboration.

With the new updated SharePoint 2016 and its accompanying Document Library updates, which Code A Site is given preliminary access to as a Microsoft Partner, we discovered that Microsoft has miraculously removed the Send to Location option from the main Document Library view.

No longer is the Send to Location feature one simple click away…

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But don’t fret! Code A Site has found a workaround. Simply follow the directions below and you will soon be able to send files to the SharePoint location of your choice. Send copies of documents to your coworkers

*Note: The following workaround needs to be done with an account with library administrative privileges. These changes will then be applied to the library for all users.

  1. Go to your Library and select the “All Documents” menu, and then “Manage Views”Manage_Views.png
  2. Select “Create column”                                                                                 Create_Column.png
  3. Add a Hyperlink column to your document library named “Send To Location.” Make sure to check the box that says “Add to Default View” and then press “Okay.”Send_To_Location_Column.png
  4. For the documents you want to replicate the “Send To Location” functionality:
    1. Select the “•••” next to the document name, then “More” then “Properties”Set_Properties.png
    2. Enter the following URL (replace the SourceURL with the correct SourceURL for the document you wish to use.
https://company.sharepoint.com/sites/demo-docCenter/_layouts/15/copy.aspx?SourceUrl=%2Fsites%2Fdemo-docCenter%2FFresh%20Paws%2Ftest%20(1).docx

 

Send_To_Location_Properties.png

 

A copy of your file is now in the location of your choice! Your coworkers can now access the file even if they don’t have the permissions to access the original location, facilitating even further collaboration.

Sometimes change isn’t always for the better and you might not like the way the new SharePoint Document Library looks. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to switch back to the classic look. Check out the following article to find out how:

If you would like to voice your thoughts on SharePoint’s new look to Microsoft, follow this link: Office 365 User Voice. You can give them feedback, suggest ideas and changes, and vote on other Microsoft users’ suggestions.

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2018-05-25T15:02:47+00:00SharePoint|