Hi c124c5bdcbf1, thank you for your reply. It appears to me that Atlassian took on the task of replacing & upgrading the existing functionality already offered by the addon, but appear to have failed to take into consideration handling of HTML links generated by Microsoft's Share > Copy link function, which to me seems like the most common user journey (I believe more users will use Share>Copy than simply copy URL from the address bar, but I'm not 100% sure). It also seems to me that Atlassian released the substitute solution and deprecated the original addon solution without verifying that the new solution achieves all the features/objectives offered by the original addon solution, else the shortfalls like this one would have been documented somewhere, which appears to be not the case. As you pointed out the old solution could handle any type of link while the new one fails to handle the most frequently used HTML link type that it generated by Microsoft's Share > Copy link function. Given that we are talking about solution substitution and failure to handle most common use case (Share > Copy link) I still see it this as a bug/regression and ask that it be recorded as such rather than a task to look into this. Also I would like to add that while I do value the widening of the scope of link conversion to other apps/functions, I don't feel that this should be justification for silently axing excising functionality like the handling of HTML links, without even a mention to end users. I would also like to draw attention to the summary of this bug Convert all types of SharePoint / One Drive links to smartcards which has been marked Closed despite the fact that the solution is still not converting all types of SharePoint / OneDrive links and in actual fact fails to handle the most common HTML links generated by Microsoft's Share > Copy link function. Given that the bug objective/ expected results of this bug still fail, I would request that this bug be reopened.

Hey Ivan! Thanks for the feedback! Whilst I agree that this specific use case worked in the old Macro but doesn't work the same way with smart links, I wouldn't call it a regression. We don't override HTML links anymore into smart links, but therefore we provide other great features e.g. getting those smart links into other products and surface areas that you couldn't use the Macro for.

That said, we will still investigate this use case. We might find an easy solution that works for this copy-paste scenario but doesn't impact others (e.g. we wouldn't want to turn your legit Sharepoint hyperlink with override text into a smart link when you copy paste it from other sources like your Confluence page or email). We've created a task to look into this and will update you if we decided to change that behaviour in the future.

Hi c124c5bdcbf1, thank you for your reply, if I recall correctly, the addon “Microsoft OneDrive for Business for Confluence", which Atlassian have replaced with this new MS link handling solution, used to handle all types of links including HTML links. I believe its correct approach on Microsoft's side to create these as HTML links, since they are providing the link in HTML format for end user convenience so it can be pasted neatly into emails and documents, which will be most common use cases, but when same links are pasted into other applications like Jira, I see it as the responsibility of target application to correctly handle the link and convert it appropriately, something that the old app solution “Microsoft OneDrive for Business for Confluence" used to do, but the new solution does not, which is effectively a regression / loss of previously had functionality as I see it. This is not a Microsoft issue but rather one for Atlassian to solve. I should also add that this way of getting links using the MS 'Copy link' option is likely the most common way in which users will get links and thus you will find most users will have no idea about the new Atlassian smart-link functionality you have added, as they will not get to experience it, they will simply paste the HTML link and not realise that it can be converted to a smart link and be embedded. I think Atlassian should still address this issue. I should also mention that the scope of this issue (handling Microsoft links) applies not only to Confluence, but also Jira and elsewhere were Atlassian allows links. 

Hi 14a97a75c29d!

Thank you for raising this. We are aware of this behaviour and unfortunately that's due to Sharepoint's 'copy' button behaviour: It actually generates HTML (an a tag) with the text pre-filled based on the file's name - you can test that yourself by pasting those links into a text editor. Changing this on our end would be a hack rather than a fix, as this seems to be by design on Sharepoint's end - and on our end we are just inserting a valid hyperlink with override text the way we receive it. We haven't seen that behaviour for other well-known tools yet, and if you'd like to see this changed, you could help by raising a request with Microsoft.

However, you can still convert these links into Smart Links by upgrading them to Inline links via the toolbar that opens on click. Alternatively, as you described, you could copy the URL via keyboard from Sharepoint instead. I hope you understand that unfortunately this is where the power of smart links has its limits as we need to rely on valid inputs to some degree.

Let me know if there's anything else we can help with,

Andre

Hi c124c5bdcbf1, thank you for your recent update. I have retested and verified that links generated from OneDrive for business is now indeed auto-converting to smart links, however hyperlinks generated from SharePoint are not auto-converting to smart links when pasted and instead are just displayed as normal hyperlink with pre-defined link name like my document.docx. As a workaround I was able to edit link copy its URL and when pasting the URL alone it does auto convert, but links generated by SharePoint share function are not just URLs, they are hyperlinks with a name and as such when pasted they are not auto-converting to smart-links, on that basis I would say this bug is not fully resolved.  

Hi skhanna@atlassian.com, just seen your update on this bug, please note that OneDrive for Business links as well as SharePoint links need to remain in scope of this bug as these are currently not working. I don't know about Google Drive links, but links from OneDrive for Business and SharePoint should work but aren't working.

The functionality to embed links generated by Microsoft share function was taken away by Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive macros are dep in favor of Smart Links - Atlassian Community which then led to bug CONFCLOUD-71970 Smart Links does not embed files for Microsoft OneDrive_SharePoint Links, which was incompletely resolved (only for address bar URLs and not for Share links), so Atlassian have in effect taken away functionality before replacing it with a suitable alternative.

Given that the option ‘Anyone with the link’ is the only working option presently, that converts to smart-card and allows embedding, and given that most organizations do not allow selecting ‘Anyone with the link’ option for security reasons, for most organizations I expect that the share option will be unusable. This means that none of the permitted Microsoft share options actually convert to smart-cards or allow embedding and the only workaround presently is to open the target document in the browser, copy URL from address bar and paste that into Confluence page. Share links used to work, was deprecated with the app, inadequately substituted and still not fixed.

Please fix this bug, so that links generated by Microsoft share option will auto-convert to smar-links and be embeddable, like they used to be when the addon was in place.

Original Bug: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-71970