Announcing a more intuitive sharing experience across Microsoft 365 for better collaboration

Being able to share files and folders easily and have granular control over permissions is essential for us, so this is a nice improvement.

However, we’re in much bigger need of a way to see what is actually currently shared from a Teams/SharePoint site. At this point, document libraries in SharePoint don’t have an icon that shows when a file or folder is shared, neither when viewing through a browser or when it is synced to file explorer. Also, there isn’t a menu that shows “Shared by us”, only “Shared with us”, the latter of which is the least important of the two. Site owners can go produce an Excel report, but that’s not very useful, as people in our organization are not minded enough for IT to understand it.

Having an easy way to keep overall tabs of what is being shared, is crucial, if you want to really be able to keep sharing permissions up-to-date and in line with what is needed/necessary, so that you don’t needlessly share with too many people for too long, which is important for GDPR compliance.

Another much needed feature, when talking about sharing, is the ability to select a bunch of files at once and share them to email, both from SharePoint and from within Teams.

I’ll add one final thing, which is that for individual users, improvements to “Shared with me” are needed. It needs to be easier to identify where a shared folder or file was shared from, especially when shared from SharePoint. Right now you only see the last part of the path underneath the shared folder or file, which means you can't easily see which sharepoint site or team it was shared from. You also can't group by those sites, which would be useful.

Thanks for listening 🙂