You don't own your links. Here's how to fix that.
Four problems with consumer link shorteners — and one fix that lives entirely in your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Most organizations running Microsoft 365 have done a security review of their CRM, their file storage, their email platform. They’ve checked authentication, data residency, off boarding procedures.
Nobody thinks about their links.
And yet your organization sends hundreds of them. — SharePoint paths, OneDrive documents, executive calendar links, internal portals — are exactly the kind of destination data a security review is designed to protect. And when someone asks "where's the link to that?" — there's no good answer. Every time someone on your team uses Bitly or TinyURL, that destination gets written to a server your organization doesn’t own, doesn’t control, and almost certainly hasn’t reviewed.
We built Link Redirector to fix that.
It runs entirely in your Azure tenant — your data, your domain, your rules. inWorks has no access to your link data. Nobody does except your organization.
But data residency is only one of the four reasons teams end up adopting it.
The IT director who wants link data in the tenant
Consumer shorteners handle the kind of URLs most security reviews are designed to protect — SharePoint paths, OneDrive documents, executive calendars — and almost nobody catches it because link shorteners feel too small to bother with. The destination data is going somewhere outside your tenant; however, no one stops to think about that until someone asks.
It’s worth considering:
Third-party involvement in breaches doubled from 15% to 30% in a single year according to Verizon’s 2025 DBIR, and 56% of organizations say employees are already uploading sensitive data to unauthorized SaaS apps.
A link shortener almost never makes the vendor review list. But, the data that it handles is top of mind when security is a concern.
Link Redirector keeps everything inside your Azure subscription. Destination URLs are encrypted at the field level before being written to Table Storage. Authentication runs through Microsoft Entra ID — no separate login, no password database to manage. The permission scope is User.Read only: your name and email to sign in, nothing else.
Every link carries a record of who created it, when it was last modified, and how many times it was accessed. Admins see all of it. And if you ever cancel, your Azure resources stay in your subscription.
The marketing lead who wants branded links
The redirect page — the few seconds between a click and the destination — is brand real estate most organizations give away without thinking about it. A link that starts with bit.ly tells the recipient you needed to hand something off to get the job done.
The data backs this up. Branded links increase click-through rates by up to 39% because people trust recognizable brand names more than random character strings. And generic shorteners leave an estimated 31% of potential conversions on the table. For links going to clients, partners, or prospects, that gap is real.
Link Redirector gives you branded short links on a domain you already own: links.yourcompany.com, not someone else’s infrastructure. Custom HTML templates let you control the redirect page itself — your logo, your colors, a message, a countdown. That moment between click and arrival has always belonged to someone else, and now it can be yours.
What about acknowledgment gates?
Sometimes a click needs to carry weight. We email policies that require an acknowledgment, or confidential documents with a terms-of-access notice, or a vendor portal with conditions to acces.
Link Redirector Countdown & Message Gates show whatever you need — a disclaimer, terms, a short message — before forwarding the visitor to the destination. You set how long it stays on screen. One-Time URLs go further: the link self-expires after the first click. Any forwarded copy stops working immediately after that.
The operations team that wants a homebase for links
Teams that manage complex Microsoft 365 environments accumulate a lot of important links. When links change, nobody knows which version is current — or whether the one in a three-month-old email thread still goes anywhere important, useful, or secure.
Link Redirector offers an Outlook Add-In lets anyone on your team browse, create, and insert short links from a task pane — in compose, reply, and read mode, across Windows, Mac, web, iOS, and Android. Admins can pin high-value links so they surface first for everyone, and lock critical ones so they can’t be deleted by accident. One library. Every link your organization has ever created, with a record of who made it and how often it gets used.
What it costs to try
Deployment is from the Microsoft 365 admin center. There’s a 14-day free trial — no credit card required. You can deploy to a pilot group the same day.
If you want to see it before you test it, we're available for a 15-minute walkthrough.
Call us at 267-857-8066, leave a comment below, or click the links above to talk it through. We will take an expert look at what you have been doing with your links and tell you honestly what we think.