For most enterprises, the largest and fastest-growing repository of business-critical information is SharePoint and OneDrive. Contracts, financial models, project plans, meeting notes, presentations, and compliance documentation accumulate across every team and department, rich with context that rarely makes it into an analytics workflow.
This content has traditionally been invisible to data platforms. Bringing it into a data lake meant building pipelines, scheduling exports, managing duplicates, and reconciling governance across two separate systems. The result: valuable knowledge stayed locked in productivity tools while analytics teams worked with an incomplete picture.
Now, SharePoint and OneDrive Shortcuts in Microsoft Fabric OneLake is now generally available. With this capability, organizations can now surface this data directly inside OneLake, without requiring traditional data movement pipelines in many common scenarios. Files stay exactly where they are in SharePoint or OneDrive, and Fabric workloads see them as a native part of the data lake.
This is more than a connectivity feature. It is the bridge between the world where work happens and the world where data is analyzed. Sales forecasts stored in Excel can be joined with CRM transactions. Legal documents can be indexed and grounded in AI agents. Financial trackers can feed Power BI reports the moment they are updated. This helps reduce the boundary between collaboration content and enterprise analytics workflows.
Customer Use Cases
Organizations across industries are already finding practical, high-value ways to connect their Microsoft 365 content with Fabric analytics and AI. Below are example scenarios that illustrate potential use cases.
Data Lake Unification Without Migration
Many organizations maintain structured data in their Lakehouse alongside a parallel, untouched archive of unstructured content in SharePoint. Shortcuts eliminate the need to choose between the two. Data engineering teams can now create a unified view across both sources inside OneLake, enabling joins, aggregations, and AI workflows that span the full breadth of enterprise knowledge, without moving a single file.
- Combine SharePoint-hosted reference tables with Lakehouse transactional data in a single Spark notebook.
- Surface operational documents alongside structured metrics in a single Power BI semantic model.
- Avoid costly migration projects by referencing content in place and retiring redundant sync processes.
Self-Service Analytics on Shared Documents
Finance, HR, and operations teams frequently maintain planning workbooks, trackers, and reports in OneDrive and SharePoint. These files are updated regularly by business users who have no need or desire to interact with a data platform directly. Shortcuts let analysts consume this content without asking anyone to change how they work.
- Finance teams can surface quarterly budget workbooks directly in Power BI without any export step.
- HR can connect headcount trackers and org charts to workforce analytics dashboards.
- Operations teams can make procurement logs and vendor documents queryable alongside ERP data.
Microsoft Fabric and Foundry: AI at Enterprise Scale
For organizations building production-grade AI solutions on Azure, the combination of Fabric OneLake and Microsoft Foundry creates a powerful foundation. Shortcuts ensure that the rich, unstructured knowledge stored in SharePoint and OneDrive is available as a live, governed data source for Foundry-based agents and copilots.
- Connect SharePoint document libraries to Foundry knowledge stores without a separate ingestion pipeline.
- Keep AI knowledge grounding current automatically as SharePoint content is updated by business teams.
- Apply Fabric data transformations to prepare document content for structured AI consumption at scale.
Features Supported in General Availability
The following capabilities are generally available and supported for production use as of this release:
Core Shortcut Capabilities
- Create shortcuts from any Fabric Lakehouse directly to OneDrive folders or SharePoint document libraries. Access files in place, without requiring explicit data duplication in many scenarios. Files remain governed by their existing SharePoint and OneDrive permissions.
- Live synchronization ensures that as content is added or updated in SharePoint or OneDrive, Fabric workloads see the latest version automatically.
Shortcut Transformations
Beyond simple file access, OneLake shortcuts include an optional transformation step that converts supported file types directly into Delta tables. This can reduce or eliminate the need for a separate ETL pipeline in supported scenarios, making document-resident data queryable by analytics engines.
- Supported file formats for transformation at GA: CSV, Parquet, and JSON.
- Transformed tables are kept in sync as new files arrive in the connected SharePoint or OneDrive folder.
- Transformed output integrates natively with Fabric warehouses, notebooks, and Power BI, enabling immediate analytics without additional data engineering.
This capability fundamentally changes how customers are working with file-based data. A SharePoint folder containing hundreds of CSV exports from a business application can be transformed into a queryable Delta table in minutes, with minimal pipeline code required in most scenarios.
General Availability Improvements
In addition to the core shortcut capability, this GA release introduces two significant platform-level improvements that make shortcuts enterprise-ready for automation, scale, and cross-organizational scenarios.
Service Principal and Workspace Identity Authentication
OneDrive and SharePoint Shortcuts now support Service Principal (SPN) and Workspace Identity (WI) authentication, in addition to organizational account sign-in. This is a critical capability for production deployments.
- Reduces dependency on individual user credentials, preventing pipeline failures when team members change roles or leave the organization.
- Authentication is managed through Microsoft Entra ID, enabling consistent security governance and audit trails.
- SPN and WI authentication support higher API limits, directly reducing throttling in high-throughput scenarios.
- Cross-tenant access: service principals can be configured to access SharePoint and OneDrive content across organizational boundaries, enabling configurable partner and subsidiary data sharing scenarios, subject to tenant policies and security configurations.
Metadata Caching and Performance
OneLake now caches SharePoint metadata internally, reducing the frequency and impact of calls to the SharePoint API during query execution. This improvement can deliver the following benefits:
- Reduced throttling under high query volumes, particularly in multi-user or scheduled workload scenarios.
- Improved query performance for workloads that enumerate or filter large SharePoint folder structures.
These improvements make shortcuts viable for production-grade pipelines and scheduled refresh scenarios that would previously have encountered reliability issues at scale.
How to Get Started
Creating a SharePoint or OneDrive shortcut in Fabric takes less than five minutes. The following steps apply to any Fabric workspace with at least one Lakehouse:
- Open a Lakehouse in your Fabric workspace. In the Explorer pane, right-click any folder and select New shortcut.
- In the New Shortcut dialog, select OneDrive or SharePoint tile from the list of external sources.
- Choose your authentication method: Organizational account for interactive scenarios, or Workspace Identity / Service Principal for automated and production workflows. Provide the SharePoint site URL and select or create a connection. If you don’t have root level access and prefer to provide the path directly, change the view to Path View by navigating to the top right corner.
- Browse to the folder or library you want to connect. Select one or more target locations and select Next.
- On the Transform page, choose whether to apply a transformation to convert supported file types (CSV, Parquet, JSON) into Delta tables. Select Skip if you only need file access. Select Create to finalize.
Your shortcuts will appear immediately in the Lakehouse Explorer. From there, you can reference them in Spark notebooks, build Power BI reports directly on the data, run SQL queries through the Lakehouse SQL endpoint, or include them in Fabric pipelines and AI workflows. Learn more by exploring Create a OneDrive or SharePoint shortcut (Microsoft Learn documentation).
We are excited to see what you build
SharePoint and OneDrive Shortcuts in OneLake represent a step toward a world where every document in your organization is an active participant in your data and AI strategy. As the boundary between productivity and analytics continues to dissolve, Fabric is designed to be the platform that connects them.
Share your feedback, use cases, and questions in the Microsoft Fabric Community forums. Your input directly shapes the roadmap.
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