Sharing is Caring, as the saying goes… But when it comes to files in your OneDrive for Business account, you’ve probably lost track of who you’ve shared what files with. Now is as good a time as any to step back and take a look at who has access to your content.
But how?
There are several ways you can view your OneDrive sharing information:
- Hover over each item to see sharing and view information in a File Card
- Click Manage Access on each item to see its Sharing Links and direct permissions
- Run the OneDrive Sharing Report in OneDrive settings
- Use Lightning Tools DeliverPoint for a comprehensive view
Let’s look at each.
File card
When you hover over a file, you’ll see its file card – first a condensed card showing some basic information, and then after a brief pause, an expanded card appears.
You’ll see on the card who has viewed the file, any conversations about it, and links to the file details and to the sharing details. If you click on See details, the info pane opens on the right side of your screen, and you can see who has access to this item.
From there, you can click Manage access to grant and remove access to individuals. Here, you can view links you’ve shared, and any direct access you’ve granted. Clicking on the ellipses next to a link will show you who that link has been shared with, and allows you to remove the link.
Manage Access
You can get to the same information as above by clicking on the ellipses menu for a given item, and selecting Manage Access from the flyout menu.
One thing to note is that it’s not possible to report on access to more than one item at a time. If you select multiple items, then some options are available in the menu, but Manage access isn’t one of them.
One Drive Sharing Report
To report on all sharing within your OneDrive, you can run the built-in OneDrive Sharing Report. Access this by clicking on the the gear, and then clicking OneDrive settings.
Go to More Settings, and then Run sharing report.
A dialog will then open for you to specify where to save the resulting csv report. If this is your first time running the report, you’ll need to first click +New and create a new folder within your OneDrive My Files library. From then on, you can select that folder as the destination for subsequent reports. (But you must select a destination each time.)
After you click Save, nothing appears to happen, but the report is being generated in the background. You may need to use your browser’s Back button to go back to your OneDrive, but then after a few minutes you should see the csv file in the folder you specified. Note that it may take quite a while to generate, depending on the size of your OneDrive content and sharing that’s been done. Note that the first time you open the csv file, it might not yet be complete, so you may need to wait.
Eventually, you should get a report similar to this:
The OneDrive Sharing Report will show you each sharing link or other type of access on each file. However, it doesn’t show users outside your organization. For example, in this OneDrive, the “2021 Expenses” spreadsheet has been shared with an external user with download blocked (“Restricted view”), but we can’t see who it was shared with. Some sharing links are reported on two rows, one row for the link itself, and one for the person given access by the link. (By the way, that last item, the folder called Social/Private, goes to a list of documents you’ve starred as ones you’re following in your tenant. It seems to be a bit of a remnant from MySites, perhaps.)
DeliverPoint
Another way to get a full report of your OneDrive sharing is through Lightning Tools’ DeliverPoint solution for SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. OneDrive reporting is a new feature as of version 3.2.0.0 of DeliverPoint, released in January 2021. With DeliverPoint you can view your OneDrive sharing links and direct access from anywhere in SharePoint or Teams.
If you are the owner of a SharePoint site, you’ll see a DeliverPoint icon in the upper right corner of your home page, and you can select DeliverPoint from there.
To get to the OneDrive reports for your OneDrive, switch to the Accounts view by opening the tree view, and then switching to Accounts view.
Then search for your account name (or if you’re a tenant administrator, you can do this for any account). Under the Reports menu, you’ll then be able to run either a OneDrive Permissions report or a OneDrive Sharing Links report.
Below are the DeliverPoint reports on the same OneDrive account as the OneDrive Sharing Report above, for comparison.
The OneDrive Permissions report shows any direct access permissions given (i.e. by explicitly granting access to a file). This does not include the owner of the OneDrive, as they have access by default, so the report is not cluttered with that account unnecessarily.
The OneDrive Sharing Links report shows any sharing links on items, to whom they were sent, and the type of sharing, including options selected to Allow Editing or Block Download. Note that we can see the external user who was given a link to the “2021 Expenses” report.
Summary
We hope this has given you the help you need to make sense of who has access to your OneDrive files! We welcome your feedback on this or any of our articles.
And if you’d like to learn more about how DeliverPoint can help with not only OneDrive permissions, but also any permissions within SharePoint or Microsoft Teams, we encourage you to watch the recording of our most recent DeliverPoint webinar, or book a private demo to see how DeliverPoint can meet your organization’s specific permission needs.
