Enhanced SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business Sharing Control Now Available

Making Sure the Right Permissions are Set

Message Center notification MC244885 of March 17 covers the topic of “Adding Quick Permissions to the OneDrive/SharePoint Share Control” (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 70806). It all sounds very impressive, but really, it’s just a tweak to the control used when sharing documents from SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

Microsoft has made many changes to the sharing control over the last few years. The most important initiative has been to impose consistency across Microsoft 365, with Teams the final workload to pick up the new control. Lately, Microsoft has been tweaking the sharing control to improve how it works, with the latest attempt being an ill-advised proposal to remove the share by Outlook option. Thankfully, Microsoft dropped that idea.

Permissions Front and Center

The latest change is more positive. It improves the usability of the option to control if a recipient of a sharing link can edit the shared file by making permissions front and center (Figure 1) instead of a behind-the-scenes option. That’s the beginning and end of the change. Whether this kind of change justifies a separate roadmap item and message center notification could be debated, but as it does affect what end users see in front of them, it’s probably warranted.

As it was before, the default in the new control is that a recipient cannot edit a shared file.

Available Now

The new control is available now for both SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business if your tenant is configured for targeted release. General availability will follow in early April. Teams has not yet picked up the new control, but that’s OK because in most cases, people share documents in personal chats when everyone in the chat gets the same permission.