There is a know problem in SharePoint – it’s complicated permissions system. As a result, many sites are overshared (overexposed) and site owners/administrators even do not know – who has access to their sites…
The most concern is sites shared with “Everyone”, “Everyone except external users” and “All users”. How do we find sites shared with “Everyone” in a large Microsoft 365 tenant?
Approach #1 (Brute force)
We can get full permissions report at tenant level (or permissions provided to “Everyone”). There are 3-rd party tools (e.g. ShareGate, SysKit, AvePoint, Metalogix etc.), or you can run PowerShell script…
Sounds easy? Well, if you have 1000 sites – probably yes. But if your environment 10K+ sites – it will take forever. Permission report might run hours for an average site with site/subsite, list/library and list item details level.
We need report detailed up to every item level deep, as even one file with sensitive info shared with everyone can cause security issue.
So, if this approach is not working – what’s working?
Approach #2 (Search)
Clever idea: why do we have to iterate through all the tenant documents/items if all the content is already crawled by search? Can we just use search to get files shared with Everyone? Sure!
Check this and this articles. Can we get results programmatically (e.g. with PowerShell)? Can we use Microsoft Graph search API? Sure.
Check this article “How to search against SharePoint Online Content with Microsoft Graph search API with PowerShell”.
But! We have two problems here.
Search Problem #1. The problem is the same as in “brute force”. Search returns so many results – it’ll take weeks to get all of them. (There are team sites “legally” shared with everyone, public Office 365 group based sites, communication sites… ).
Search Problem #2. Even whet we get all search results – we do not know – what is the exact Url of the resource shared with all users. So we will need to build list of sites based on the search results – ant then still need to run permissions report against these sites.
Approach # 3 Hybrid
The idea: why do we need to get all search result if even one result from the site would be enough to add the site to the list of sites require permission report.
So, consider (imho, the best) approach.
- You get list of sites in tenant. Here you can refine the list excluding, e.g. sites connected to public teams or known communication sites… Finally wou’ll have a list of sites you want to check – if there are resources shared with “Everyone…”
- You run search against each site in the loop (e.g. consider KQL option “Site: https://yourTenant,SharePoint.com/sites/YourSite”. Once even one result fount for the site – add the site to the “Open Sites” list
With this approach you will get list of sites shared with “Everyone…” in a coule of minutes.
The Next step would be “How to let site owners know what are resources shared with Everyone… on their sites”.
References