DeliverPoint News – OneDrive Permissions Reporting and Copy Object Permissions

Our first new release of 2021 is a new version of DeliverPoint SPFx for SharePoint Online. DeliverPoint is a SharePoint and Microsoft Teams integrated permissions reporting and management tool designed for Business Users to manage and report on SharePoint permissions, and for Microsoft Teams Owners to manage permissions across their Teams and Private Channels. You can read more about DeliverPoint here. However, in this post, we would like to concentrate on some newly released features and improvements to DeliverPoint.

Brand new to release 3.2.0.0 of DeliverPoint SPFx is OneDrive Permission reporting, OneDrive Sharing Links reporting, and the ability to clone permission sets between objects such as SharePoint Sites, SharePoint Lists and Libraries, and also SharePoint Folders and List Items. Let’s begin with OneDrive Permission reporting.

OneDrive Permission Reporting

There are two new features regarding OneDrive Permissions in DeliverPoint. The first that we will discuss is OneDrive Sharing links. Sharing Links are usually generated by business users who wish to share a file or folder with another recipient, either internal or external to the organization. Due to the changes in Microsoft Office Applications such as Word and Excel, the sharing links are becoming more common. In the past, we’d send a copy of a file as an attachment, but users when selecting the sharing link option, are providing access to the file, with the benefit of not having multiple copies. The below screenshot, is from within Microsoft PowerPoint. Notice that the business user can share the link with people in the organization, people with existing access, or specific people.

It is hard to keep track of all of those files, and folders that you have shared over time. So, one of the new features of DeliverPoint is to provide a Sharing Links reports for yourself, or if you are a tenant administrator, you can run a sharing links report on another user. The report will display the filenames, the sharing type (anyone with the link, specific people), the permissions that the user has to your file(s), the members (users), and whether editing is allowed along with whether downloading the file is allowed.

OneDrive Direct Permissions are different to OneDrive Sharing Links. Within OneDrive, you can select Manage Access against a file or a folder, and directly grant permissions to an internal or external user. You can specify whether you grant ‘Can Read’ or ‘Can Edit’ using the side panel shown below, or navigate to the Advanced Settings and grant any permission such as Full Control, Design, Edit, Contribute, Read or Restrictive View. Applying a direct permission to a file or folder will break the permission inheritance for that file or folder.

Again, this can be difficult to keep track of over time. So, DeliverPoint now provides the ability to report on items within your OneDrive to which other users have access. We don’t include your own permissions to your own files and folders, since that would make for an overwhelming report. But seeing who else has permissions to your files or folders in one report is a useful feature. You can sort or filter the report on any of the columns such as Account, Item, or Permissions.

The next step may be that you want to bulk remove permissions, reset the broken permission inheritance, or copy the permissions to your files from one user to another. These are features that are currently available for SharePoint, but we’re now working on introducing to DeliverPoint in our May 2021 release.

Next, we’ll take a look at cloning object permissions within SharePoint.

Cloning Object Permissions

Within SharePoint, you can inherit or break the permission inheritance on sites, lists, libraries, items, files and folders. You can then grant specific permissions to those objects to a number of Active Directory Security Groups, Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint Groups or Direct Permissions to an individual account. If, lets say, that you broke the permissions on Folder A, any subfolders of Folder A would inherit the permissions by default. But what if we had a sibling (rather than child) folder or item to Folder A? Do you need to go through the process again of breaking permission inheritance, granting your desired permissions, etc? Well, in SharePoint out-of-the-box, yes! DeliverPoint now offers the capability of Copying the entire permission sets from one source folder to many other objects. Or, using a Site permission set and copying that to other sites (even if they are in other site collections), and the same between Lists.

Below, you can see how we can copy the permission set between these objects. If we select a Site, you will see the option to copy the site permissions. Select a list, and you can copy a list permissions, and the same applies to items within lists and libraries.

If you would like to see these features in action, and discuss how they could help you and your business, please set up a demonstration with us today, download the trial, or attend our next DeliverPoint webinar.

If you already have a current subscription to DeliverPoint for SharePoint Online, you’ll need to update the SPFx package in your app catalog to take advantage of these new features. You can download version 3.2.0.0 from our Download Center.