When SOAR was first developed, online storage services like OneDrive, SharePoint, DropBox or GoogleDrive were very much in its infancy. Today these services are hugely popular and some doctors prefer to store their appraisal (and other) documents online rather than having hard copies or even local copies on their computers.
We don't have any functions where documents stored externally can be linked or sync'ed directly to SOAR. However, as with most things, we do have a workaround.
Firstly, if your health board has enabled it, the easiest approach is to sync your OneDrive to your desktop.
If not, you can download the documents to your desktop, upload to SOAR, then delete from your desktop.
Or you can share your external documents with your Appraiser on SOAR via dedicated shared links.
Regardless of which online storage service you use, do NOT upload anything that includes person/patient identifiable information.
OneDrive is just one example, if you use other online storage services, the same principles will apply:
It is important that you provide a description (or a bullet point list of the documents) for auditing purposes. Remember, you are only providing a link to your documents - the files themselves will remain on your OneDrive, no copies of it are transferred to SOAR.
For Revalidation, your Form 4s and submitted appraisal forms may be sampled by the Responsible Officer (RO) before a recommendation is made. The RO will not have access to your OneDrive so a description of what was submitted would help greatly.
NB - if the RO requests access to specific documents, it will be up to you to send these to them directly as they are not stored on SOAR.
Navigate to your OneDrive, select the folder you wish to share for your appraisal, and click on the "Share" button near top left of screen:
A popup window will open, giving options on how to share the folder:
If you want to set a timeframe to how long your appraiser can access the files you are sharing, click on the cogwheel icon next to the "Copy link" button and a new pop up will appear:
Choose the settings as you deem fit. To allow your appraiser to be able to download the documents (if applicable) you need to change the view setting to "Can edit". Set the expiration date as you see fit. Click apply when finished, which will take you back to the previous pop-up:
You can now either enter the email address(es) of your appraiser in the pop-up, add a message and click "Send". You can, if you wish, click on the "Copy Link" button to generate a unique shareable link to insert into the relevant comments box on SOAR.
When your appraisal forms have been completed and submitted, the appraiser will see the link you have pasted and be able to navigate from that to your OneDrive. They will only be able to see and view the documents you have shared in the specified folder.
The only options your appraiser will have is to either view the documents, or download and view offline at a later time.
Whilst the options and steps to set the sharing permissions will be slightly different, the principles are the same:
Please be advised that the SOAR helpdesk will NOT have the capacity, knowledge or the resource to help with queries around individual external storage providers.
Just to reiterate the earlier point:
This page was last updated on: 29/07/2025
