How to create a link to an existing SharePoint site

Regular SharePoint sites can be listed together with MetaShare workspaces, in MetaShare’s start page. Metadata can be applied to these sites and therefore they can be both filtered and searched on. A prerequisite to be able to create a link to an existing SharePoint site is that you have been assigned the “Workspace Creator” role in Azure Active Directory and that a SharePoint site configuration is available in your MetaShare.

Follow these instructions, to create a link to an existing SharePoint site:

  1. Go to MetaShare’s start page.
  2. Click on the “New” function in the horizontal toolbar:
    Create workspace
  3. A workspace creation form will be shown on MetaShare’s right-hand zone. If your MetaShare has more than one workspace configurations, the user will be asked to select a configuration:
    Choose a workspace configuration
    When clicking on the drop-down, your MetaShare configurations will be listed and look something like this:
    Workspace configurations grouped by configuration type
    To create a link to an existing SharePoint site, choose one of the configurations under the “SharePoint site” grouping. If you instead want to create a MetaShare workspace, follow these instructions. Note that once a workspace had been created, you will not be able to change its configuration later on.
  4. Depending on which workspace configuration you select in the drop-down, different sets of metadata can be presented in the workspace creation form that now appears:
    Workspace creation form, for a linked SharePoint site
    1. If any of the available metadata fields in the property card were filtered, prior to the workspace creation, these filter values will be prefilled in the corresponding metadata fields of the workspace creation form.
    2. The “SharePoint URL” field is the only mandatory field and will have a red frame around it, the other fields are all optional. Fill in the URL of the existing SharePoint site that you want to link to. Note that you need to have access to the actual site to create a link to it.
    3. The “Save” button will be enabled once all mandatory columns are filled in.
  5. Click on the “Save” button.
  6. The SharePoint site will be listed in the workspace list after you refresh the page, but only shown to the users who have access to the site. The site’s icon will be a SharePoint icon instead of MetaShare’s cube icon:
    SharePoint site listed in woirkspace list