Controlling Oversharing in SharePoint Online: Smarter Access Management in Microsoft 365

Leave a reply

Oversharing remains one of the most persistent challenges in SharePoint Online. With the introduction of Microsoft Copilot and its AI-powered search capabilities, the issue has become even more visible—and more urgent to address. Microsoft has acknowledged this by introducing the SharePoint Advanced Management suite, aimed at helping administrators to bolster content governance throughout the Microsoft Copilot deployment journey.

Why Does Oversharing Happen?

In most cases, oversharing is unintentional. Based on my experience, the root causes typically fall into four categories:

  1. Unaware Sharing: A user shares a site, library, or folder without realizing it contains sensitive information.
  2. Unaware Uploading: A user uploads sensitive content to a location that is already broadly shared.
  3. Human Error: Mistakes like selecting the wrong group or sharing a folder instead of a file.
  4. Convenience: Users opting to share with “Everyone” to avoid the hassle of managing individual permissions.

Why It’s a Bigger Problem Today

In the past, search in Microsoft 365 was content-driven—you had to know what you were looking for. Today, search is context-driven. Microsoft 365 proactively surfaces content with suggestions like “Here’s what might be interesting to you” or “Here’s what others are working on.” This increases the risk of oversharing content being exposed.

Separate issue, non-technical, but related to the subject – not every user knows that search in Microsoft 365 is security-trimmed, i.e. provides results from only what this specific user has access to. Sometimes people might think of Microsoft 365 search the same way as general internet search (If a can see it – then everyone can see it, or why my private documents appear under Bing search?).

The Admin Dilemma

As SharePoint administrators, we’re caught in a classic catch-22:

  • Complex Microsoft products
  • Users prone to mistakes
  • Management demanding simple, fast solutions

What seemed like straightforward fixes for oversharing actually concealed the true issue, generating new problems, increasing admin burden, perplexing users, and ultimately hurting company productivity. Examples are (I would never do that):

  • Exclude sites from search indexing (Set “Allow this site to appear in search results?” to No)
  • Turn off Item insights, turn off People insights (turn off Delve)
  • Truncate enterprise search with “official” sites only (via query)

Microsoft offers two solutions: “Restrict discovery of SharePoint sites and content” and “Restricted SharePoint search”. Both solutions aimed to exclude content from search and from Copilot. Microsoft: “Restricted SharePoint Search allows you to restrict both organization-wide search and Copilot experiences to a curated set of SharePoint sites of your choice… and content users own or that they have previously accessed in Copilot.”. “With Restricted Content Discovery, organizations can limit the ability of end users to search for files from specific SharePoint sites.”

Microsoft clearly says that “limit the ability of end users to search” is a temporary measure that “gives you time to review and audit site permissions”… “to help you maintain momentum with your Copilot deployment while you’re implementing comprehensive data security”. Also: “Sites identified with the highest risk of oversharing can use Restricted Content Discovery to protect content while taking time to ensure that permissions are accurate and well-managed”.

Microsoft highlights that “Overuse of Restricted Content Discovery can negatively affect performance across search, SharePoint, and Copilot. Removing sites or files from tenant-wide discovery means that there’s less content for search and Copilot to ground on, leading to inaccurate or incomplete results”.

And finally “Restricted Content Discovery doesn’t affect existing permissions on sites. Users with access can still open files on sites with Restricted Content Discovery toggled on.”. I.e. solutions “Restricted SharePoint Search” and “Restricted Content Discovery” do not solve the root cause of the problem (oversharing), but make the problem less visible.

With over 15 years of experience in SharePoint and more than a decade working with Microsoft 365 and Azure—including large-scale tenants—I’ve seen this problem evolve. Now, with Copilot in the mix, it’s more critical than ever to implement a robust access management strategy.

How to solve the real oversharing problem
(My Ideal Tenant Configuration)

Here’s what I would recommend for minimizing oversharing in a Microsoft 365 environment (think of it as SharePoint Governance):

1. Remove “Everyone” and “Everyone Except External Users”

Disable these groups in the people picker to prevent broad, indiscriminate sharing. Instead, provide other options for sharing content with larger audiences (see below).

2. Implement Sensitivity Labels for Sites

  • Enforce mandatory sensitivity labels for all sites.
  • Labels should control site visibility (e.g., Private, Public) and be clearly named

The label is visible across all interfaces—Teams, SharePoint, libraries, lists, folders—so users always know how wide the content is shared from the sensitivity label.

3. Empower Users with Guardrails

  • Allow users to create Teams and communities, but enforce sensitivity labels.
  • Enable requests for standalone sites (Team or Communication) with required labels.
  • Disallow private or shared channels under public Teams to avoid label mismatches (e.g., a private channel labeled “Public”).

Benefits of This Approach

Once implemented:

  • Users will always know whether a site is private or public.
  • Sharing with “Everyone” on private sites will be technically impossible.
  • Users needing broad access can request public sites, e.g.
    • Public Teams for collaboration with everyone (allows read/write access)
    • Communication site for publishing information (allows read only access)

Yes, this may lead to more sites and Teams. Yes, this may lead to more tickets from users who at private site wanted to break permissions as usual and share list or library or folder with everyone. Yes, we would need to develop automation that can help manage the scale. But that’s a worthwhile trade-off for reducing oversharing!

Automation Requirements

To support this model, we’ll need (at least) the following custom-designed solutions:

  • Automated Site Provisioning: A request-and-approval process for creating labeled standalone sites.
  • Channel Monitoring: A custom solution to detect and flag private/shared channels under public Teams, since there’s no out-of-the-box enforcement.
  • Large Custom Security Groups Monitoring: make a list of large custom security groups users can share information with – and check on scheduled bases – if the site is shared with large custom security group – site must not be labelled as private.

Environment Clean-Up

To prevent oversharing, we should not only “from now on” follow the strategy described above, but also make sure our existing sites are compliant with our governance. This would be another challenge.

Removing a user from the Everyone Except External User group in SharePoint Online

Leave a reply

A common question in SharePoint Online is: How can we block access for a specific user to all sites? In SharePoint Server (On-Premises), this was relatively simple—we could apply a “Deny” policy at the web application level. However, SharePoint Online doesn’t expose web application settings, so there’s no direct way to say, “Block this user from accessing SharePoint.”

In SharePoint Online, access is granted—not explicitly denied. To prevent a user from accessing SharePoint content, you must ensure they are not granted access in the first place. This becomes tricky due to the built-in group “Everyone except external users”, which automatically includes all internal users. If a site or resource is shared with this group, the user in question will also gain access—there’s no way to exclude them from this group.

Despite this limitation, there is a workaround. While you can’t remove a user from the “Everyone except external users” group, there are strategies to restrict their access effectively. Consider the following options (and we’ll deep dive in all options, discussing pros and cons):

  1. Stop Using “Everyone except external users” for Permissions and
  2. Block Access via Conditional Access
  3. Make the user “Internal Guest”

(bonus) Validate the user does not access SharePoint

1. Stop Using “Everyone except external users” for Permissions

To exclude (hide) “Everyone Except External Users” claim in People Picker – you’d use

Set-SPOTenant -ShowEveryoneExceptExternalUsersClaim $false

Though this option looks simple at first – it would require some extra work, because

  • you’d need to deal with existing shares with “Everyone Except External Users”
    should you remove all shares with “Everyone Except External Users”? What to replace it with?
  • you’d need to deal with “public” groups, teams, sites
    Public group-based site (team) will have “Everyone Except External Users” in members by default and even if you remove it – it’ll be added again automatically (?)
  • you’d need to provide an alternative for scenarios where sharing with everyone is a requirement
    what alternative? See below.

Assign Permissions Using Custom Groups

The idea is to create a custom security group (e.g. “All internal users”) or a couple of custom security groups (e.g. “All employee” and “All contractors”) and include in these groups all users who we want to have access to SharePoint except those who we want to keep out of SharePoint. Again, sounds simple, but I anticipate the following challenges.

You do not want to manually add every new account to these groups. So these groups must be dynamic – if so – you’d need to figure out criteria – consequently you’ll end up creating a custom user property and you’d have to setup this property. Alternatively – you’d need to automate assigning users to these groups as part of onboarding.

If you are a part of enterprise with on-prem directory synced to cloud – you’d told by Identity management that this is a very bad idea – to sync 99,900 accounts out of 100,000 total accounts to a custom group.

So, this option – using custom security group as an alternative to “Everyone Except External Users” would work well in small tenants, but in medium and large – would require some extra work.

2. Block Access via Conditional Access

You can create a Conditional Access Policy to block access for specific users to SharePoint Online from Microsoft Entra Admin Center -> Security > Conditional Access. You’d create a new policy, select the user(s) to exclude, select app – Office 365 SharePoint Online, choose Block access. Once the policy enabled, the selected user(s) will be blocked from accessing SharePoint Online and OneDrive.

First of all this option might cost you some money, as it requires Azure AD Premium P1 or P2 (or
Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Microsoft 365 E3 or E5).

Second, as it says, your user in question will be fully blocked from accessing SharePoint Online and OneDrive. But what if they still need access a few sites while being removed from ‘Everyone Except External User’ group?

3. Make the user “Internal Guest”

This option is not so obvious, but in many cases might work better than all others. Here is the idea. Actually it is not always external users are guests and internal users are members. You can have internal guests and external members (see this Microsoft’s article). There is a property in Entra Id – “User type” and usually it’s a “Member” for internal users – users created in Entra Id or synced from on-prem AD. External users are usually have User type as “Guest”. Only users with type “Member” are included in the built-in “Everyone Except External User” group.

So you’d need to change user type in Entra Id from Member to Guest – and in a couple of hours this user will loose all access to SharePoint provided via “Everyone Except External User” group. But, at the same time – you’ll be able to provide access for this user on individual basis.

Note: changing user type from Member to Guest comes with important implications and limitations. In a nutshell, a user becomes a Guest, e.g. a user cannot browse the full directory, have restricted access to Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams features. Changing the user type may affect audit trails, compliance policies, and conditional access rules that differentiate between internal and external users.

Validate the user does not access SharePoint

This is not an answer to question “How to remove a user from “Everyone Except External User” group”, but answer to question “How to ensure a user is not a part of “Everyone Except External User” group” or “How to ensure a user does not have access to SharePoint if access is provided via “Everyone Except External User” group”.

  • site admin can check user’s permission via Site settings – Advanced – Permissions – Check Permissions
  • SharePoint admin can check audit log

Note: Removing a user’s SharePoint license does not remove their access if permissions are still granted via this group

SharePoint Site Ownership Policies Deep Dive

Leave a reply

SharePoint Site Ownership Policies comes with SharePoint Advanced management or Copilot and is part of Site Lifecycle Management. In a nutshell, it does 1) Identify sites that don’t meet organization’s ownership criteria, 2) send notifications to find new site owners or admins and 3) automatically mark sites in read-only (or just report). Below is my deep dive in this policy.

I will not retell what is already documented by Microsoft, but you can find some gotchas below.

Notification emails start coming in a few minutes after you activate the policy. From email address is
SharePoint Online <no-reply@sharepointonline.com> .

Here is how a notification email looks like (in case site has one owner and need another one):

SharePoint Site Ownership Policies Notification email example (in case site has one owner and need another one)

Site Name (title) is mentioned 4 times. There are 3 links in the email (SharePoint logo, site title and “Go to site” button) – all lead you to the root of the site that needs an owner.

The email template is not customizable at the moment (June 2025) and might mislead a little, as it says “Site Name” needs a site owner. but site does have an owner. Policy want an existing single owner to assign as second owner, which is said further in smaller font and not much people are able to force themselves to read. (Update: we expect Microsoft released Site lifecycle management policies v 2 before Sep 2025).

What I really do not like here is that even for group-based sites (e.g. teams) the policy asks to add a “site owner“, though it should be “team owner”. The only difference is if the site is a teams-connected site – there is a subtitle “Connected to Teams”:

I’d also assume that some users will need additional instructions – how to add a second owner to the site. There might be a confusion in terminology – who is the site owner, like “there are plenty people in ‘My Site Owners’ group – why am I asked to add one more?”

In case the site does not have owners and the policy is configured to send messages to site members and/or manager, here is an example of the email notification:

SharePoint Site Ownership Policies Notification email example (in case site does not have an owner and needs one to be assigned)

Basically, the difference is it says “Would you like to be a site owner?” vs “Identify an additional site owner to ensure compliance.” and the button says “Become a site owner” vs “Go to site“.

You cannot forward this email to other users (you can, but content will not be the same). Here is the example:

SharePoint Site Ownership Policies Notification email example (in case something is not configured correctly at the Exchange level, or network or computer etc. ) and the message is rendered as "This email contains actionable items that aren't supported by this client. Use a supported client to view the full email."

There are other cases an email comes as “This email contains actionable items that aren’t supported by this client. Use a supported client to view the full email.”

TBC:

Sites regulated by policy

Configuring the policy, we can choose site template – e.g. Classic sites, Communication sites, Group connected sites without teams, Team sites without Microsoft 365 group and Teams-connected sites to scope down the policy with the kind of sites the policy will be applied to.

We know, that template site was created with does not actually guarantee the kind of site in it’s current state. E.g. we can convert classic site to a group-based site or we can create site with no team and later create a team for the site.

With that said,
Question: what Microsoft means by “Sites regulated by policy” – template site was created with or current site category?

Owners vs Admins

Another moment I’d like to clarify is what Microsoft means by owner and admin, as configuring the policy

  • Under the “Who should be responsible for each site?” we can specify “Site owners” and/or “Site admins”
  • Under the “Who should be notified (via email) to assign or claim site responsibility?” we can not only specify “Current site owners” and/or “Current site admins”, but also “Manager of previous site owner and admin” and “Active members”

We know that for group-based sites “Group owners” of the Microsoft 365 group associated with site is actually goes to site collection administrators and nobody is added to SharePoint “site Owners” group by default. At the same time at the SharePoint site you can add users to site collection admins and/or to the default SharePoint “site Owners” group (the one with “Full Control” permissions. Moreover, nothing prevents us to create a SharePoint group “Site Business Owners” with e.g. read-only permissions to the site or e.g. create a SharePoint group “Board Members” with “Full Control” permissions to the site.

So, question: who according to Microsoft’s policy implementation are considered as site owners and site admins? Does it change for different types of sites?

References, helpful links:

Connecting to Microsoft 365 and Graph API from the Azure Function App via Managed Identity

Leave a reply

There is a well-known and well-documented way of connecting to Microsoft 365 SharePoint and Graph API from Azure Function App via keeping credentials (Client id and client secret) in the Azure Key Vault. In this article I explained how to configure Azure Key Vault so Azure Function can get credential and use them to access Microsoft 365 SharePoint and call Graph API. For this to work we need an App registration with permissions provided. But what if we assign permissions directly to the Function App?
As per Microsoft, managed identities enable Azure resources to authenticate to cloud services (e.g. Azure Key Vault) without storing credentials in code. Is it possible to use function managed identity to access Microsoft 365 SharePoint via PnP or Graph API? Follow me.

I assume we already have an Entra Id, a Microsoft 365 subscription in it and an Azure subscription in the same tenant.

Create a User Assigned Managed Identity

There are two types of managed identities in Azure – System assigned and user assigned.
If you go to Azure Function app -> Settings -> Identity – you’ll see these two options:

  • System assigned Managed Identity will be created automatically if you select Status:On and Save. Having System-assigned Managed Identity you can provide permissions to Azure resources (e.g. storage, key vault) to this specific instance of function app. If you create another function app that’d need the same access – you’d need to enable system assigned Managed Identity again, for this new instance and again provide permissions.
  • User assigned managed identity is created as standalone Azure resource, and will have it’s own lifecycle. A single Azure resource (e.g. Function App) can utilize multiple user assigned managed identities. Similarly, a single user assigned managed identity can be shared across multiple resources. So if you deploy another Function App that need the same permissions as your existing function app – you’d just assign the same managed identity to this new function app.

So before we assign a user-assigned managed identity to a resource, we need to create a user-assigned managed identity:

For the Name of your User Assigned Managed Identity consider something that would uniquely identify you (your team) and your project/app at tenant level, e.g. “m365-Enterprise-SharePoint-Engineering-Managed-Identity-Demo”:

Create and Configure a Function App

Create your function app as you usually do that. (If you want to kill two birds with one stone – create a function app with “App Service” – aka Dedicated plan – you’ll see how to secure your function app storage account access with Managed Identity).

I use PowerShell Core as runtime stack and Windows.

Once Function App is created – we need to create a function. I’ll do it via Azure Portal for simplicity and I’ll select timer-triggered function:

Ensure that this function works ootb correctly by triggering test run:

Then we’d need to assign a managed identity earlier created to this function app.
Navigate to Function App -> Settings -> Identity, select “User Assigned” and managed identity:

Disable Az

Navigate to Function App -> Functions -> App Files. Select “profile.ps1”.
Remove or comment out part that use Az module cmdlets:

Update function dependencies

Since I use PowerShell and PnP for this demo, I need PnP module loaded.
Navigate to Function App -> Functions -> App Files. Select “requirements.psd1”. Update your code by adding ‘PnP.PowerShell’ = ‘2.12.0’ to the required modules. Do not enable Az module:

It takes time for the function app to download and install PnP module so you can use it in functions.

Update function code

Add the following code to function:

# My custom code
Write-Host "My custom code started"
$siteUrl = "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/Test101/"
$adminUrl = "https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com"
$UserAssignedManagedIdentityObjectId = "b0bfe72c-73a9-4072-a78b-391e9670f4b9"

Write-Host "Connecting as admin..."
$connectionAdmin = Connect-PnPOnline -Url $adminUrl -ManagedIdentity -UserAssignedManagedIdentityObjectId $UserAssignedManagedIdentityObjectId -ReturnConnection -ValidateConnection
Write-Host "ConnectionAdmin:" $connectionAdmin.Url
Write-Host "Getting tenant site as admin..."
$site = Get-PnPTenantSite -Identity $siteUrl -connection $connectionAdmin
Write-Host "Got site:" $site.Url
Write-Host "Getting admin site..."
$site = Get-PnPSite -connection $connectionAdmin
Write-Host "Got site:" $site.Url

Now you can Test/run the function or wait 5 minutes, then check what is in logs. You should see, that

  1. connection ran successfully, but
  2. getting site failed with “ERROR: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.”

And that is ok, as

  1. With Connect-PnPOnline we are authenticating. And since managed id exist – we were recognized
  2. Our managed Id does not have any permissions yet, so any request will fail

Now it’s time to provide actual permissions for the managed identity to the site.

Grant permissions for the managed identity to access SharePoint via Graph API

Here is the most interesting part – somehow we need to provide our user assigned managed identity with permissions to access SharePoint (or any other Microsoft 365 service) via Microsoft Graph API and/or SharePoint API. We already know how to grant permissions to an App Registration in Azure – there is a GUI for that. But with respect to managed identity – there is no GUI. It’s done via Microsoft Graph API or PowerShell. And we need admin permissions to assign roles to a managed identity.

Who can grant roles to a managed identities

It says a Global Admin permissions required to provide roles to a managed identity.

As usual, there are two options: delegated permissions and application permissions (here is where differences explained). In both cases you’d need an App Registration with the following API permissions assigned and consented :

  • Application.Read.All (or higher)
  • AppRoleAssignment.ReadWrite.All

If you have an app with delegated permissions – you’d need a Global admin role to be activated. Or you need an app with application permissions configured as below:

If you are getting something like this:

That means you configured an app incorrectly.

Assigning permissions with Microsoft Graph API:

tbp…

Assigning permissions with PnP PowerShell

Here is the code:

$Id = "..." # User Assigned Managed Identity Object Id = Principal Id
Get-PnPAzureADServicePrincipalAssignedAppRole -Principal $Id 
$role = "Sites.FullControl.All"
Add-PnPAzureADServicePrincipalAppRole -Principal $Id -AppRole $role -BuiltInType MicrosoftGraph
Add-PnPAzureADServicePrincipalAppRole -Principal $Id -AppRole $role -BuiltInType SharePointOnline

Issues found

What I found is that connection to a specific site does not work, .i.e. the following code:

$siteUrl = "https://jvkdev.sharepoint.com/sites/Test101/"
$UserAssignedManagedIdentityObjectId = "b0bfe72c-73a9-4072-a78b-391e9670f4b9"
Write-Host "Connecting to a specific site..."
$connectionSite = Connect-PnPOnline -Url $siteUrl -ManagedIdentity -UserAssignedManagedIdentityObjectId $UserAssignedManagedIdentityObjectId -ReturnConnection
Write-Host "ConnectionSite:" $connectionSite.Url
Write-Host "Getting site..."
$site = Get-PnPSite -connection $connectionSite
Write-Host "Got site:" $site.Url

returns [Error] ERROR: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.

Update: it’s probably just a matter of time… After some hours the same code started working well.
Though here Microsoft says “To ensure that changes to permissions for managed identities take effect quickly, we recommend that you group Azure resources using a user-assigned managed identity with permissions applied directly to the identity”

Sites.Selected

Would everything above work if we need to provide access for the function app user assigned managed identity to a specific SharePoint site via Sites.Selected?

It works! I used a separate user-assigned managed identity, provided it with Sites.Selected API permissions, provided access for the managed identity to a specific site and it worked!

PnP.PowerShell version

Is there a difference in behavior of PnP.PowerShell v2 and v3? Let us see…

As for now, it works with both versions – PnP.PowerShell 2.12.0 and PnP.PowerShell 3.1.0

References

SharePoint Inactive Site Policies

Leave a reply

SharePoint Advanced Management includes Inactive Site Policies under Site lifecycle management. Effective content lifecycle management is a key pillar of SharePoint governance. It plays a vital role in optimizing storage, preserving data integrity, and ensuring regulatory compliance. By systematically removing inactive or outdated sites, it also enhances security. Additionally, it supports successful Copilot implementation by ensuring that the information accessed is both accurate and current. So, how exactly this Inactive site policy works and what is the difference between Entra Id groups expiration policy and SharePoint Inactive Site Policy.

SharePoint Inactive Site Policy vs m365 Groups Expiration Policy

The Groups Expiration Policy has been a feature of Azure AD (Entra ID) for quite some time. It is included at no additional cost. This policy automatically notifies group owners about upcoming expirations and provides options to renew or delete the group. Since all self-created Teams teams and Viva Engage communities are backed by SharePoint sites and managed through Microsoft 365 Groups, this policy also plays a significant role in SharePoint governance ensuring that information stored in SharePoint remains current and properly maintained. I have an article Microsoft 365 group expiration policy deep dive.

Inactive Site Policy is a feature of SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM), which is an add-on and require premium SharePoint license. It also Identifies inactive sites, Sends notifications to site owners and can automatically archive or make sites read-only. Sound like very similar to to groups expiration policy.

Key differences

FeatureGroups Expiration PolicyInactive Site Policy
Where to configure
Who can configure		Entra Id
Groups Admin		SharePoint Admin center
SharePoint Admin
Scope (policy is applied to)Microsoft 365 Groups
(including group-based sites, like teams, yammer)		SharePoint Sites
(including both – group-based and non-group-based sites)
Who is notifiedGroup OwnersSite admin (group owner), site owners (*) TBC
Notifications come from emailmsgroupsteam@microsoft.comno-reply@sharepointonline.com
What if resource is activegroup is automatically renewed, no emails sentpolicy is not triggered against active sites
Can admin download report (list of inactive groups/sites)NoYes
Period of inactivity configurationConfigured in days, should be greater than or equal to 30 daysOptions are: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months
Actions available (Options provided) to a resource ownerrenew the group
delete the group		certify site
learn how to delete a site
What happens with resources owner did not take action (or with orphan resources).Notifications is sent to a specific email address, group is deletedsite is archived or set to read-only or nothing

Inactive site policy user experience

Here is how the email notification looks like:

Note that

The email subject includes “Action required” and site title (name).
It always says “… has been inactive for more than a month” even if the policy configured for “6 months”.
It shows SharePoint logo, which might mislead “teams-oriented” users.
Site title is not clickable, so site admin/owner cannot just click site link but have to navigate to site manually.
When user clicks button “Certify site” – a message “The action completed successfully” pops up at the bottom of the email for a few seconds and then disappears. The email itself does not change, so when a user opens the same email again – there is no visual evidences the action was taken.

At the bottom of the email Microsoft mentions tenant name.

The email template is the same for all kinds of policies – it does not matter if the policy action is configured configured as “do nothing”, or to automatically enforce archive site or set it to read-only. I.e. email just says “Select Certify site to confirm if it’s still in use, or consider deleting it if the site is no longer needed.”. Email does not inform users that site will be set to read-only or archived.

Also there is no link where a user can get more info on the subject, but Microsoft says that inactive sites policy email template will be customizable – in the Site lifecycle management policies v2 expected summer 2025.

Admin – Inactive sites report

You can download a csv report of inactive sites generated by policy.
Report includes fields:
Site name, URL, Template, Connected to Teams, Sensitivity label, Retention Policy, Site lock state, Last activity date (UTC), Site creation date (UTC), Storage used (GB), Number of site owners, Email address of site owners, Number of site admins, Email address of site admins, Action status, Total notifications count, Action taken on (UTC), Duration in Read-Only.

There is no GUI to see the list of inactive sites (you can only download a csv file), but there is a magic button “Get AI insights”.

Get AI insights

Here are insights I have seen so far:

  • Inactive sites with significant storage usage
  • Multiple sites owned by the same account
  • Sites with Multiple Owners
  • Sites inactive for over a year

Inactive sites policy behavior

Policy sends emails immediately after policy activation. That means if you have thousands of inactive sites you might hit a 10k exchange limit of daily emails sent.

If a user owns multiple inactive sites – he/she will get multiple emails.

You can scope the policy down by site template, sensitivity label and creation source if you want different behavior for different types of sites, e.g. if you want to setup longer period of inactivity for one type of sites and shorter for others… not sure when it makes sense…

Implementing an Inactive sites policy

First of all – It is highly recommended to take care of ownerless sites (find owners) before triggering an Inactive sites policy.

If you have a relatively new tenant – you probably have not much inactive sites, so turning the policy on should not be a problem. The older your tenant is the more inactive sites you have. For older tenants you probably already have a lot of inactive sites – ant that could be a problem. So we’d need to take care of initial policy implementation, and after some time it will just work so we could forget about it.

There is no way to pilot this policy with pre-selected scope of sites or users. You can scope the policy down by site template, sensitivity label and creation source, but you cannot scope the policy down the way only sites or uses you want to be a testers or pilot project members will be the target of the policy.

In small orgs there should be no problems implementing this policy. Still I would start from just getting a report. There is a “How long after the last activity should a site be considered inactive?” configuration, so I’d start from the longest – 6 months, then move to the shortest you need. Medium orgs could get some ideas from recommendations to large orgs below.

In large orgs you might

  • trigger a spike in number of tickets submitted by users who needs help
  • hit a maximum sending limit with Exchange Online which is 10,000 email recipients per day

So it would be crucial for enterprises to avoid an initial surge and start from smaller number of recipients, and gradually let the policy work at a full strength. One of the options to achieve that would be

  1. configure the policy for reports only, get inactive sites report
  2. select sites owner and admins in a separate list – then select only unique ones – so every user will get only one email, split this list into small chunks
  3. communicate to site owners (by chunks) – using enterprise-approved “send from” email and enterprise-branded email template saying that the policy is gonna be implemented, you might receive an email (like this one – screenshot), you can trust this email and click buttons. A list of site urls user owns must be included in the email, so user could visit these sites
    (Optionally) you can instruct users how they can delete sites if site is no longer needed or archive sites if they are not sure if it is still needed or not

If so – it’d

  • forewarn users so they would know to do and not be surprised and would create less tickets
  • users might choose to delete or archive sites which would also
  • users would visit their inactive sites and trigger sites activity, and that should dramatically decrease number of emails sent to users initially, on the day one of policy implementation
    ideally – if users visit all sites – you’d have no inactive sites, so you’d just turn the policy on with no fear

then you’d wait for a couple of weeks, get new report to ensure that you have much less inactive sites – and you’d just enable the inactive sites policy (starting from the longest period – 6 month of inactivity)

References

Content Shared with Everyone: Access Review

Leave a reply

This article is for SharePoint or Microsoft 365 admins focusing on governance and information protection. If you have SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) – aka SharePoint Premium licensed or you got at least one Copilot for Microsoft 365 license (as having m365 Copilot license automatically enables SharePoint Advanced Management in tenant), then under reports – Data access governance (in SharePoint admin center) – you can not only get Content shared with ‘Everyone except external users’ (EEEU) reports, but also initiate access review. Let us look more closely at this functionality and discuss the pros and cons..

I’ll not repeat Microsoft documents:
– SharePoint Advanced Management
– Content shared with ‘Everyone except external users’ (EEEU) reports
– Site access reviews for Data access governance reports
but I’ll focus on what is not there and a real-world experience.

Reports

First of all, report does not provide you with all SharePoint content shared with “Everyone except external users”. Report helps you with what was shared with EEEU in the last 28 days. That drastically limits usage of this feature. I.e. you should first get initial report on the all content shared with EEEU, and somehow take care of it by other means (consider How to Find Content Shared with Everyone in SharePoint and Teams), and only then you can use this Microsoft’s content shared with EEEU report and access review.

You can share content with EEEU or directly – by adding EEEU to resource permissions directly or by including EEEU into SharePoint group. So content shared with EEEU reports come in two flavors – “Specific files, folders and lists” and “Site membership”

“Specific files, folders and lists” user experience

When you initiate access review from the “Specific files, folders and lists” type of report – users (site admins/owners) get email notification that says “You have sites with specific files, folders or lists shared with ‘Everyone except external users’. This means everyone in your organization has access to this content. Review the items shared for potential oversharing and manage their access.“

Content Shared with Everyone: Access Review - notification email example

Scrolling down, in the email, site owner can see a list (table) of incompliant sites with the following columns: Site name, privacy, sensitivity, external sharing and “Items shared”. Site name is clickable and sends user to the root of the site.

Below the list of sites there is a button “View shared items” that sends user to the special system page –
“https://orgname.sharepoint.com/teams/site01/_layouts/15/siteaccessreview.aspx/<id>” where he/she can see list of SharePoint items shared with EEEU. Columns are: (item) Name, Shared on (date), Shared by (email), Action (manage access). Item name and manage access are clickable.

Content Shared with Everyone: Access Review - user experience - siteaccessreview.aspx page example

If an item is a library item – e.g. document or a folder – it is displayed correctly – with icon according to the doc type and doc name. Clicking on the doc name – an actual document opens so you can review it’s content.

If item is a list item – it is displayed incorrectly – no icon, no meaningful info about the item (it is displayed as “”). Clicking on the link – a warning icon and message “Can’t preview this file. Open the file or download it to view in your desktop app”. Buttons “Open” and “Download” are there but not helpful as well.

Clicking on “Manage access” opens almost standard “Manage access” dialogue you can have via “manage access” item context menu, but with no “…” more options at the top right:

which makes this dialogue screen useless, as you can only provide additional access to the item or remove all access. You cannot remove EEEU from access without three dots “More options”.

Manage Access from the Policy:

Regular Manage Access:

“Stop sharing” literally removes all permissions to the item except owners

Under the “Groups” tab – you’d see that the item is shared with “Everyone except external users” but you will not be able to remove just this group from access…

By clicking on a group name – site owner will be able to change this group permissions, but the option “No direct access” is not selectable…

“Site membership” user experience

In the case with a “Site membership” report, text would be slightly different: “You have sites where ‘Everyone except external users’ has been added to the site membership. This means everyone in your organization has access to this site. Review site permissions for potential oversharing and manage access.“, which makes sense.

Right after that, in the email, site owner can see a list of incompliant sites with the following columns: Site name, privacy, sensitivity, external sharing and “Groups with org-wide access”. Site name is clickable and sends user to the root of the site.

content shared with EEEU access review - Site membership user experience - You have sites where 'Everyone except external users' has been added to the site membership. This means everyone in your organization has access to this site. Review site permissions for potential oversharing and manage access.

Then there is a button “View SharePoint groups” that sends user to the special system page –
“https://orgname.sharepoint.com/teams/site01/_layouts/15/siteaccessreview.aspx/<id>” where he/she can see list of SharePoint groups (clickable) with EEEU as members.

By clicking on a group name – admin opens standard SharePoint “People and Group” membership page:
/_layouts/15/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=X, which is nice, because from this screed a site owner can simply remove this group from the access list using Actions-> Remove:

siteaccessreview.aspx page

User can navigate directly to the reviews page:
“https://orgname.sharepoint.com/teams/site01/_layouts/15/siteaccessreview.aspx” and if there were reviews initiated by SharePoint admins – and it’ll work – admin will see all access reviews initiated for this site – columns are: Review name, Description, Requested on (date), Status, reviewed by (email) and admin comment. In case no reviews were initiated against tie site – “You have no reviews to take action on” will be displayed. That’s good.

Complete review

On the bottom of the siteaccessreview.aspx page you’ll see “Complete review”

Click on it, add comment (optionally) and confirm:

SharePoint Admin is able to see the status of every site access review stats – pending or completed – in GUI and in the .CSV report saved.

Admin experience: GUI only

Once you got report – you can initiate access review. All must be done in GUI, click-click-click selecting sites… But what if you have thousands? There is no PowerShell cmdlets or API for this functionality, which really limits your ability to implement it gracefully, especially in large Microsoft 365 environments and automate it.

Download detailed report

Report “Specific files/folders/lists…” does not include files, folders, list – i.e. it does not include what exactly is shared with EEEU. Report includes site id, url, name, template, is it teams-connected, sensitivity (?), privacy, external sharing, primary admin name and email, and number of items (?) shared with EEEU.

So technically you can communicate to site owners, but you’d need to rely on them to figure out what content is shared with everyone.

Email template

When you initiate Site access review – an e-mail notification is send to site owners. This e-mail is not customizable at all. The only admin can do is to add a message (for every “initiate Site access review” action). But the email looks really similar to the site lifecycle policies email notification, and Microsoft is working on version 2 of the policies with a customizable email template.

This email comes from “SharePoint Online <no-reply@sharepointonline>” address (not customizable), so comes “from outside of your organization” and can be considered as scam.

Microsoft’s logos and other graphics are blocked by default and e-mail includes a button “View shared items” – enough red flags for users to consider it as spam. Keep this in mind.

The good news is e-mail contains site name – so site owner can recognize it at act accordingly.

Usage scenarios

Small tenants

In small Microsoft 365 environments – yes, this functionality probably can be used “as is” (and should be used). Especially for new tenants – I’d recommend enable reports and use this feature on a regular basis.

Medium-size tenants

I’m not sure. It depends on your governance rules and company culture.

Enterprises

I’m very pessimistic if this functionality is useful in large environments. Reasons are:

  • if your tenant is not new – you already have a lot of overshared content, so you still need to come up with your custom solution (idk – PowerShell scripts?) to deal with oversharing. But once you designed your custom solution – why don’t you continue to use it?
  • In enterprises usually all the communication must follow approved templates, branding and so on.
  • User experience of reviewing shares with everyone… and managing permissions designed very poorly… In enterprise you do not want to deal with thousands of tickets from site owners who could not figure it out
  • In enterprises you’d think of automation

SharePoint Advanced Management

Leave a reply

SharePoint Advanced Management is an add-on to Microsoft 365. Microsoft says that it is a powerful suite of tools for IT admins to bolster content governance throughout the Microsoft Copilot deployment journey. Let us have a closer look at what SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) is how exactly it helps with governance enforcement in the Copilot era.

Microsoft classifies SAM’s features as “Manage content sprawl”, “Manage content lifecycle”, “Manage permissions and access”. I’d put SAM’s tools into these buckets: Reports, Policies, Search, Features.

SAM Reports

Reports are something that provides you with data, so you can analyze these date and use them to build/update your own governance strategy and maybe take some immediate action. Reports available are:

  • Change history reports
    you can choose org-wide or site-level settings, specify date range, sites and all or specific admins
  • Enterprise App Insights
  • OneDrive Accounts report
  • Data Access Governance (3 different ones)
    • Sharing Links with 3 pre-configured reports:
      Anyone links, People in your org links and Specific People links shared externally
    • Sensitivity labels applied to files: select label -> generate report
    • Content Shared with Everyone Except External Users:
      to discover specific sites whose content was made accessible for EEEU
      you can choose from two types of report: where specific files/folders/lists are shared with EEEU or “Site membership” where EEEU was added as a member and initialize access review
      (see Deep Dive into SAM DAG Content shared with EEEU access review)

SAM Policies

Policies allows you to set some governance rules, so that rules will be applied automatically, with no or little your intervention. SharePoint Advanced Management policies are:

AI Insights – report feature that uses a language model to identify patterns and potential issues and provide actionable recommendations to solve issues

Features

Features are smaller that policies, more like an update to existing functionality.

  • Conditional access to SharePoint site policy
    This enhances existing conditional access Entra Id feature with the ability to apply the policy to SharePoint sites directly or via Site sensitivity label.
  • OneDrive access restriction
  • SharePoint site-level access restrictions
  • Block download policy
  • Your recent actions
  • Default sensitivity labels for document libraries
  • Site access review

SAM for Search

I put it separately:

  • restrict discovery of SharePoint sites and content
  • Restricted SharePoint search

TBP

Microsoft 365 admin center displays incorrect sensitivity label

Leave a reply

Found an issue in Microsoft 365 – it seems like if a sensitivity label is not published for a user – this user will see inconsistency when different sources display sensitivity label differently.

Scenario: A site/group sensitivity label was created under the Purview center. Label enforces some settings to the group/site, like privacy and external sharing. User cannot assign label to site/group until label is published to that user. In this scenario sensitivity label was published to the admin1 but not published to the admin2.

Admin1 assigned sensitivity label to a group-based site.

What admin2 can see in this case is:

ProductSensitivity Label
Teams correct sensitivity label
SharePoint Site correct sensitivity label
My Groups – Groups I Own – View experiencecorrect sensitivity label
My Groups – Groups I Own – Edit experienceno label
SharePoint Admin Centercorrect sensitivity label
Teams Admin Centercorrect sensitivity label
Microsoft 365 Admin Center – Teams&Groupsno label
Entra Id – Groupsno label

Moreover, in some cases you could even see incorrect sensitivity label under Entra Id…

Microsoft says it’s by design. For me this kind of design simply does not make sense.

There is a Design Change Request:
https://feedback.azure.com/d365community/idea/4246b7a8-2119-f011-9d47-7c1e52d4bdd3

If you think this behavior must be changed – please vote for the DCR.

Below are some screenshots:

In particular,