How do I create a folder shortcut that works for all other people?

Question

Question

I have the following folder structure on a teamsite:

Vegetables
  |
  |--- Carrot
  |--- Tomato
Fruits
  |
  |--- Banana

My final goal is to have folder Tomato under Fruits and to communicate to Vegetables visitors that the Tomato folder is moved.

I moved Tomato under Fruits, and to prevent that people who visit the Vegetables folder are confused, I created a link to Fruits/Tomato in Vegetables.

Problem

However, people who sync both Vegetables and Fruits folders with OneDrive for Business now see an .aspx file in Vegetables. When they click on it, various things can happen (based on what program is associated with .aspx), but they're not transported to Fruits/Tomato.

What I tried

Regular shortcut

I tried creating a .lnk file (a regular shortcut in Windows Explorer). This doesn't work as .lnk files point to an absolute path.

If my OneDrive for Business syncs the Vegetables and Fruits folder they end up in:

c:\Users\my_user\org\teamsite\vegetables
c:\Users\my_user\org\teamsite\fruits

A .lnk file in the Vegetables folder would point to c:\Users\my_user\org\teamsite\fruits\tomato and when it's synced to another_user the .lnk file points to a non-existent location.

Relative shortcut

This tool creates relative '.lnk' files. So now it points to ..\fruits\tomato. This relative shortcut unfortunately does not work for other users for an unknown reason.

Answer 1

Can you create the shortcut using the %USERPROFILE% environment variable? This then replaces C:\Users\my_user so your path the shortcut would point to would be:

%USERPROFILE%\org\teamsite\fruits\tomato

This should work as it is not user specific and is just using a environment variable that should already be set.