How to add Office 365 SharePoint to Explorer - Solved

[Dos_Box]

My apologies if this has been posted before, but this is one of those little niggling problems that I am thankful to have finally resolved.

As we are currently awaiting the mythical upgrade to our 365 setup (and access to SkyDrive) that we use we have been using the various web and Office tools to upload content to our SharePoint which is, tbh, a PITA. Now I have finally found out how to add SharePoint as a link to your favorites in Explorer so you can drag and drop files and open them with no effort at all.

The details can be found here: How to map an Office 365 Document Library in Windows Explorer (updated) - Microsoft Lystavlen - the Office 365 and CRM Online display board - Site Home - TechNet Blogs and the bit you need is at the bottom:

 

SharePoint Online in Office 365 uses forms based authentication and the user is authenticated using a SAML token. This SAML token expires every 2 hours (some say longer though). After that the mapped drive for the SharePoint library cant access the library unless the user signs in to the SharePoint Online site again from the browser, even if the user tick off "Keep me signed in". As an alternative you can add the URL of the document library to Favorites in Windows Explorer. You'll need to do that via e.g. Word.

1. Open the document library in SharePoint Online
   
2. Copy the URL of the document library to the Clipboard (e.ghttps://mso365wiz.sharepoint.com/Docs/Forms/AllItems.aspx)
   
3. Open a new Word document
   
4. Click Save As to open the Save As dialog
   
5. Paste the URL from the clipboard into the Address text box at the top of the Save As dialog
   
6. Delete /Forms/AllItems.aspx from the URL in the text box
   
7. Press Enter to open the document library
   
8. Right-click Favorites (top left of the Save As dialog)
   
9. Click Add current location to Favorites
   
10. Rename the new shortcut (optional)
    

 

And yes, it works

[AngryTechnician]

We're on the 'new' Office 365 (so we have SkyDrive Pro) and it looks like this might not work after the upgrade - I get error messages saying that Windows could not create the shortcut.

 

This happening for anyone else who has had the upgrade, or is it something specific to our workstations? We are on Office 2013.

[lgill]

I get the message "Windows can't create a shortcut here. Do you want the shortcut to be placed on the desktop instead?" We are also on the new Office 365 with Office 2013.