Forum Discussion
OneDrive Sharing UI "breaking" "Shared with Me" functionality
Glad to hear it Guy Johnson! Sorry we had to go through so much trial and error to figure this out. I'm going to send a copy of this thread to the team so we can make sure future iterations take all of this into account. If you have any other questions, let me know! Thanks!
This is new for me too!
BTW, is still there the option to get an anonymous link? How?
EDIT: Well, it appears that the default sharing option for a file ("anyone with this link can edit...") sends indeed an anonymous link with edit permissions to the recipient. Maybe this is the answer to people complaining that recipients out from the organization, and not with an MS Acoount or an O365 Account, don't like to be forced to signin for an MSA. Anyway, to send as default an anonymous link with edit permissions appears a bit too "strong" for me...
MicrosoftHi all,
We did release a message center announcement on the new sharing dialog in ODB but it was a month or two back so it has probably expired at this point. The very short version though is that our previous model combined two separate concepts (how do I want to share? and how do I inform the recipient of their access?) in a very weird way. If you wanted to e-mail the recipient, you could only permission the user directly. If you wanted to copy a link, you could only copy anonymous or company shareable links.
In the new sharing dialog, the user now makes a deliberate choice between e-mail and copy, and then another choice on the type of link (anonymous, people in my org or permissioning) to share. We've gotten a lot of good feedback on the sharing dialog and we are constantly looking for ways to improve.
In the meantime, we have a feature in the SharePoint admin center that lets the admin choose the "default link" in the sharing dialogue (either anonymous access, internal or direct/restricted). This chooses the default link that is selected but users can still change if needed.
Hope this helps! Thanks!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager
IMO this was a very big blunder. The "shared with me" issue is how we discovered it, but that's not the root of the problem. The real problem is default behavior that creates anonymous links, which in every reasonable case should be the *exception.* So now we have some number of anonymous links floating around and I'm not particularly happy about that.
Also, while the new sharing dialog is simpler, we have had comments that it is less intuitive. I tend to agree. The old Share dialog actually made a lot of sense in that you could easily specify the "type" of sharing you wanted to perform. I agree with your notification comments, as "Get Link" makes more sense now, but I think that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
Interestingly enough, we can still get to the old dialog by clicking a file and bringing up the info pane on the right and then clicking "Add People."
I don't want to be overly critical, but this doesn't feel like it was well thought out.
- StephenRice
Hi Boden Larson,
Thank you for the feedback, this is definitely a delicate area where security and usability need to be balanced carefully. Our approach thus far has been to make the dialog as usable about of the box as possible and to provide IT controls that let them scope things down to meet their security requirements.
As I mentioned above, we have been taking all the feedback we've heard and we are in the process of applying it to our sharing flows to address those concerns. You should see the fruits of these changes in the next couple of months.
As for tracking down anonymous links that may have been created, you should be able to use the audit center to find all resources that had anonymous links created for them. We are also working on some other features to help both tenant and site collection admins discover how their resources are shared out.
- David Rosenthal
Just came across this old thread, and decided to bump it back up because this "simplified" sharing experience is still there and still confusing my users. I get a handful of people asking me every day if we've disabled External Sharing because they are trying to share to an external domain that we have whitelisted and getting an error because they aren't clicking the little hyperlink to change the option.
I would urge you very strongly to make this more clear on the initial dialog box. I don't understand the need for or reason behind hiding that option behind a tiny hyperlink that everyone overlooks.
I would also urge you to focus on enterprise scenarios as opposed to anonymous links scenarios as you stated above. No enterprise that looks at security at all has anonymous links turned on, and those that do should probably think hard about whether that is a good idea. Do you really want anonymous users in your tenant with potential access to your IP? I don't, and my legal team certainly does not.
We're all more than willing to give you our feedback and guidance on these things StephenRice. I do this quite regularly for a number of product teams at Microsoft. Wictor Wilen and I even spent an entire day last week with the Microsoft Teams team in Bellevue giving feedback and talking about the future. Reach out anytime on here, or find me on Twitter and we'll setup some time to talk.
IMO this was a very big blunder. The "shared with me" issue is how we discovered it, but that's not the root of the problem. The real problem is default behavior that creates anonymous links, which in every reasonable case should be the *exception.* So now we have some number of anonymous links floating around and I'm not particularly happy about that.
Also, while the new sharing dialog is simpler, we have had comments that it is less intuitive. I tend to agree. The old Share dialog actually made a lot of sense in that you could easily specify the "type" of sharing you wanted to perform. I agree with your notification comments, as "Get Link" makes more sense now, but I think that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
Interestingly enough, we can still get to the old dialog by clicking a file and bringing up the info pane on the right and then clicking "Add People."
I don't want to be overly critical, but this doesn't feel like it was well thought out.
Hi Stephen.
You write: "In the new sharing dialog, the user now makes a deliberate choice between e-mail and copy".
Do you mean the choice between "Share" and "Get a link"?
Also, you write: "we have a feature in the SharePoint admin center that lets the admin choose the "default link" in the sharing dialogue".
Where exactly?
TIA
Salvatore Biscari wrote:Hi Stephen.
You write: "In the new sharing dialog, the user now makes a deliberate choice between e-mail and copy".
Do you mean the choice between "Share" and "Get a link"?
Also, you write: "we have a feature in the SharePoint admin center that lets the admin choose the "default link" in the sharing dialogue".
Where exactly?
TIA
You can find the setting in the SharePoint Admin Center > Sharing
Thanks Ivan!
BTW, "Direct - only people who have permission" means exactly that the link can be used only if the recipient already has permission for accessing the file. You can see this in practice if you "Get a link" instead of "Share". In fact in the first case, where you can send manually the link to other people, they will be able to access only if they already have the right permission in place; in the second case, the permission is automatically created for the email recipient, but the same rule holds.
StephenRice: IMO it would have been much better to put in the SharePoint setting also the option for the default about read-only or read/write.
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for the input, I can't remember the MC message to be honest. I have messages dating back to August in the MC, but not the one about the Sharing Dialog. Do messages have a unified expiration date, or are they different for every message?
StephenRice wrote:In the new sharing dialog, the user now makes a deliberate choice between e-mail and copy, and then another choice on the type of link (anonymous, people in my org or permissioning) to share. We've gotten a lot of good feedback on the sharing dialog and we are constantly looking for ways to improve.
Here's a screenshot of this new sharing dialog, and I'm not sure what you mean by "user is making a deliberate choice".
I can pretty much assume, most of the users will enter the recipients mail address, add a message and hit "Share" without deliberately thinking about how this file/folder is shared. Being the IT-Admin and an O365 enthusiast, even I've done it and just assumed this worked as before and only looked a little different.
It would be great if you would move the sidepane controls, that opens upon clicking that blue text link, to the sharing dialog itself, since there isn't much going on in the sidepane, that wouldn't fit in the dialog itself. This blue text link, looks more like it would link to an office.com information page about sharing itelf, rather than to additional controls. Or add an edit icon (pencil) next to it.
Thank you for the workaround with the defautl sharing experience, though I would suggest to update the wording on this. I wouldn't have selected this option on my own, because I assumed "Direct - only people who have permission" means that the link to file will shared, but you can only access it, if you already have permission for it.
- Here is some info about this from August
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/OneDrive-for-Business/A-Simpler-Sharing-Experience-on-OneDrive-for-Business/m-p/4817#M99
