How to make a sidebar alias for a stubborn Sharepoint

Note: although this worked in Lion (10.7.5), it doesn’t seem to work in Snow Leopard (10.6.8)

Our group has a shared directory on an institutional server. We use it for group-wide sharing. Recently, the server was updated and the directory structure changed. Particularly, this meant that although individual folders in the directory could be targets for aliases, the root directory, home to about 139 directories of heterogeneous information, apparently could not.

Previously, I had a sidebar alias for the root of our directory on the server. Why was this useful? Because our group sharepoint is one of about 100 on the network drive, and having to navigate to it is tiresome, and perilous if making a complex drag-and-drop operation.

I would like to call up the root of the sharepoint with a single click, but how? I got some hints here, but this workflow didn’t actually function for me – I couldn’t drag to the sidebar directly. Here’s the workaround that I used.

I was not able to drag the sharepoint to the sidebar. I was able, however, to cmd+option+drag the sharepoint to the Desktop. I got an alias to the share point as a folder. Clicking on this brought the familiar “alias missing a target” message.

The alias “[youralias]” can’t be opened because the original item can’t be found.

I took the option to fix the alias by navigating to the list of share-points on the sever, in the window entitled “select new original”.

Selecting the sharepoint for our group didn’t give me any active “open” button (shouldn’t this button really offer “use” in this instance? But that’s a whole nother discussion). Double-clicking opened the share point and then I got the “open” button.

Hereafter, double-clicking the shared folder alias on the desktop opened a new finder window, right in the sharepoint.

I could drag this alias to the “Devices” section of the Finder sidebar, at which point the icon changed from a shared folder to a shared drive, both on the desktop and the sidebar (this was a copying operation).

Ejecting the network server caused the sidebar link to disappear, but reconnecting (cmd+K in the Finder) brought it straight back, and indeed automatically brought me a Finder window of the Sharepoint.

Success – a great efficiency increase!