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!
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.
- StephenRice
Hi David Rosenthal,
Thanks for your feedback! All of the issues you mentioned should be addressed very soon. Please keep an eye on message center as we'll be posting more information there. When that goes live, we're also going to make sure there's a thread here on the community forums so we can do an informal Q/A on the changes. Thanks!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
