Link to Legacy SharePoint Site Not Working

NotSoAverageJoe 96 Reputation points
2021-06-09T14:03:12.727+00:00

Hi Everyone,

I'm running into an issue with linking to a document in a legacy SharePoint site (SharePoint 2010).

For some background, I'm in the process of creating a new team site in SharePoint Online. However, my company's main intranet site is still based off of SharePoint 2010. For the team site that I'm creating, I want to link to certain documents on the main site that my team doesn't own (i.e. I don't want to make copies and risk sharing an older document if there is a change made). However, when I embed the link in SharePoint Online, it doesn't open the document when clicked.

Some strange quirks that I found with this problem are:

  1. If I use IE instead of Chrome, this problem doesn't occur
  2. If I create a new tab in Chrome and paste the link, the document will open

I believe that these quirks imply that there is an issue with using a modern browser when linking to documents on a legacy SharePoint site. However, it can't just be the browser as pasting the link directly into a new tab works. Therefore, SharePoint Online must have something in the backend that is blocking this link from opening. Does anyone know if there is an option to disable this "feature" or some workaround to bypass it?

Update: it appears that this issue is only affecting MS Office files, like Excel or Word. Links to PDFs and webpages on the older version of SharePoint work.

SharePoint
SharePoint
A group of Microsoft Products and technologies used for sharing and managing content, knowledge, and applications.
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  1. NotSoAverageJoe 96 Reputation points
    2021-06-15T18:51:58.047+00:00

    It looks like the files that I was trying to link to have ActiveX controls built-in to them and it was preventing the files from opening. My company has an extension enabled in Edge that fixes the issue.

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  1. Elsie Lu_MSFT 9,801 Reputation points
    2021-06-10T09:37:26.227+00:00

    Hi @NotSoAverageJoe ,

    Per my test in SP 2013, I am not able to reproduce your issue. I can successfully download documents in SPO pointing to old links(from SP2013) in Chrome and IE. Not sure if this is a compatibility issue between SP2010 and Chrome. Since Microsoft has stopped supporting SP 2010, I would suggest you consider upgrading your SP2010 to the current mainstream version (SP2019 or SPO).


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