Context
I am a user of Sharepoint at my company where we do project based work. Every project has its own team site.
Over the years content on a certain subject is written in multiple projects, making the content scattered over multiple team sites.
As I am an "owner" of one of the subjects I want to centralize the information that is scattered. For this I created another team site where I aim to collect a selection of the documents from the various project team sites.
Now I'm looking for a productive way to link project team site files to my subject team site.
What I've tried / looked into
spEventReceiver
I found this answer, but it implies that I have access to develop in the Sharepoint environment which is not the case
Cross site publishing
This answer mentions corss site publishing. It looks good, but as I have no control over the creation of project team sites I don't think it's feasible.
Copying
Initially I tried to copy over relevant documents from the various project team sites to my subject team site, but I realized that that could lead to the creation of multiple versions of the same document (e.g. when someone on the project site edits the document after I've copied it).
Sharepoint links
I have tried using links which works reasonably well, but it has the downside that links do not work when they're synced via OneDrive for Business (they just appear as an .aspx
file).
As syncing is the way most people access files on a team site, this is therefore a deal breaker.
I was hoping it would work similar to Google Drive where one file can live in multiple folders.
"Copy to" functionality
I've tried out the "copy to" functionality which almost does what I want, but it requires that:
- users on the project site check-out files they edit (this does not happen now)
- users on the project site manually push updates to the file copies
These requirements make it not usable, as in practice this would result me in chasing every project team site user to push changes after they update something.
Question
How can I keep a file in sync between two team sites, ensuring that both team sites remain syncable via OneDrive for Business?