This month (September 2021), we are releasing DeliverPoint 3.4.0.0 for Microsoft SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. DeliverPoint provides Site owners, Site Collection Administrators and SharePoint Administrators the ability to report and manage SharePoint permissions both contextually in SharePoint and Teams, or centrally for bulk reporting and management.
In the 3.4.0.0 release, we’ve introduced the ability to save reports as a template so that you can quickly re-run your reports when you need to without having to change sorting, filters, select scopes or change settings. There are also many other refinements to the standard edition of DeliverPoint, and also an announcement of an Enterprise edition of DeliverPoint which uses a backend database for producing scheduled reports across extremely large scopes.
DeliverPoint provides some powerful permission reports ranging from a simple ‘Discover Permissions’ that shows everyone that has permissions to your Site(s), List(s), Folder(s) and Item(s) to Unique Permission Reports that display what unique permissions a specific user account has anywhere within a Site Collection. Each permission report in DeliverPoint can be sorted by each column, filtered to show a specific user account, specific permission level(s), or filtered by groups such as Azure Active Directory Security Groups, Microsoft 365 Groups (formerly Office 365 Groups), or SharePoint Groups. Further options include whether you would like to focus your report on larger scopes allowing you to produce permission reports that span multiple site collections, multiple associated sites within a Hub, Teams and Private Channels, or simply multiple lists and libraries. Each report can also be refined with settings such as Include Unique Sub Sites, Include Sharing Links, or Show Item Hierarchy.
Choosing your scopes, setting your filters, and changing your refinements can be time consuming if this is a report that you expect to run regularly. Therefore, with DeliverPoint, you can now generate your report the way that you would like it, and then save that report so that it can be run again whenever you need it.
The below image illustrates a permission report across multiple Sites in a Hub with a focus on any List or Item with unique permissions. It is filtered to show only those users with Edit permissions assigned to them.
The settings for the report are illustrated below. Note the selection of the sites to include in the tree view, and the filters and refinements in the right-hand side panel.
Once the report is saved as a template with a descriptive name, note how you can simply select your report template and re-run the report using the Generate button. Upon saving the report, you can also select whether the report will be available for just you, or shared for other users with full control to be able to run.
If ever you want to revisit the settings, scope, or filters for your report, these can be viewed by clicking the information symbol next to each saved report.
Notice that the Save as Template option is available across all of the DeliverPoint Permission Reports including the Compare Permission Report. The Compare Permission Report displayed below is allowing me to compare permissions across multiple sites where some of them have unique permissions. Re-running this compare permissions report regularly from a template would save valuable time when keeping all of your sites’ permissions in check.
Rollback Permission Changes (Change Default Behaviour)
DeliverPoint enables the ability to Copy Permissions, Transfer Permissions, Delete Permissions, or Grant Permissions across multiple objects such as multiple Site Collections, Multiple Sites, Multiple Lists etc. When you are performing an operation such as a Transfer Permissions shown below, it is possible to set the ‘Support Rollback’ option to True or False. Setting the option to True will allow you to reverse the DeliverPoint operation. This can be either as a safety net should you make the wrong selection when performing a large-scale job, or as a way to temporarily modify permissions but allow for the reversal. E.g. if User A is on temporary leave and User B requires their permissions whilst they are covering for them, we can copy permissions from User A to User B, and then reverse the Copy Permissions job when User A returns to work.
The default has always been set to False. Using the DeliverPoint Powershell commands, you can now configure the Default for Support Rollback to be True or False depending on your organization’s needs.
To set the Support Rollback to True by default, the following command can be used:
Set-SPOStorageEntity -Site APPCATALOGURL -Key "_lt_deliverPointCommonOptions" -Value "8" -Comments "Some Comment" -Description "Some Description"it can then be set back to False using:
Set-SPOStorageEntity -Site APPCATALOGURL -Key "_lt_deliverPointCommonOptions" -Value "0" -Comments "Some Comment" -Description "Some Description"
Hiding Actions from all users except Site Collection Administrators
DeliverPoint provides any user who has the ability to perform permission changes at the selected scope to be able to use the Copy, Transfer, Delete, Revoke, and Grant permission operations. DeliverPoint would not allow by default for any user to make permission changes if they did not have the ability to do so ordinarily based on their current permissions. However, some of our customers have requested that permission operations should only be visible to Site Collection Administrators. The operations can now be configured using DeliverPoint Powershell commands to only show the operations to Site Collection Administrators of the current site.
The Powershell to hide the Actions:
Set-SPOStorageEntity -Site APPCATALOGURL -Key "_lt_deliverPointCommonOptions" -Value "2" -Comments "Some Comment" -Description "Some Description"In order to unhide them:
Set-SPOStorageEntity -Site APPCATALOGURL -Key "_lt_deliverPointCommonOptions" -Value "0" -Comments "Some Comment" -Description "Some Description"
Export to Excel (not just CSV)
All DeliverPoint reports including the Discover Permissions, Compare Permissions, Unique Permissions etc can be exported. This is useful to take a snapshot of the current state of permissions for a given site. The exported file was a CSV file which allowed the report to be opened in Microsoft Excel. Some alphabet formats such as Hebrew did not display correctly using CSV as a file type. Therefore, we have now modified the Exported file to default to a XLSX file type to overcome the issue.
Enterprise version of DeliverPoint
Lightning Tools DeliverPoint is a very simple to install application within Microsoft SharePoint Online. Once DeliverPoint is installed into the AppCatalog, any user with Full Control to a site will be able to access the Reports and manage permissions within that site. The reports in the standard version of DeliverPoint are all real time reports which makes it very useful for understanding who has permissions to your site(s) right now.
Some of our clients have in excess of one hundred thousand users, which typically equates to tens of thousands of site collections and millions of documents. Attempting to produce real-time permission reports across this volume of content can be challenging. Therefore, we have created over the last two years, an enterprise version of DeliverPoint. The Enterprise version requires some guidance from Lightning Tools to configure the Microsoft Azure environment. The purpose of using Microsoft Azure is to be able to schedule a permission report. The report’s contents will be stored in a specified SharePoint library so that it can be accessed without having to produce the report on demand. The reports can be scheduled to be produced on a repeating schedule such as monthly or quarterly. To see a demonstration of the Enterprise version of DeliverPoint, please arrange a demonstration using the below link.
