can I create a document from a link?

Question

I am an absolute SharePoint rookie. We are on 2007.

In SharePoint, I have created a link to a file on a file share. I would like to copy the file to a SharePoint document library. Is this possible?

I have played around with it a bit and it looks like I can only copy the link...

EDIT: I should provide more detail on what I am trying to do and why. I have a significant number of Excel spreadsheets that are created every night and saved with the same name to a file share. Not many folks have access to the file share. I would like to know if I can create links in SharePoint to each file and then create a workflow to move them (the documents, not the links) to the appropriate locations.

I understand that non-Microsoft tools are out-of-scope for this site, but in case it matters, we use Nintex.

I will also add that I am looking for a solution that does not involve scripts outside of SharePoint or mapping our file system to a SharePoint library. We already have a few ways to skin this cat but I am looking into the possibility of simplifying it to solely a SharePoint solution.

Answer 1

Maybe a simple solution would be to create a simple powershell script that move the file from the file share (or copy) to sharepoint. Then use windows task scheduler to run the job at specified time.

Or, from sharepoint, create a timer job that will periodically grab content from the file share and copy it in one of the lib.

In you need real time, you can also create a custom Webpart that will enumerate files in the file share, and a custom handler that will read the binary to serve it over http. Beware of this solution as it can have security issue.