Forum Discussion
Why does default option sharing OneDrive for Business docs now give link anyone can use to edit?
Anyway you can change the default in OneDrive admin center.
- StephenRice
Microsoft
Hi all,
Looks like you've already posted the solution but to expand quickly on Salvatore's answer, if you select "Direct" as the default link, users will share by default with the "restricted" link. The dialogue will say something like "Only people on the To: line" or "Only specific people".
The one difference between this option and the old "restricted" link option is that users have the ability to permission new users at the same time they e-mail or copy the link. If you have any questions, please let me know!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
One caveat to possibly keep in mind is that when people in large organizations start adding people through this feature, it has the potential to bloat security principals (unique ACLs) attached to a site really quickly. This adds to processing overhead for search, retrievals etc, and reduces performance overall. For larger organizations, there may need to be an option to turn this off so we can have one function per dialog i.e. sharing screens/dialogs for sharing only, and permission screens/dialogs for permissions. This would encourage site owners (often power users) to be more conscious of their permission structure and site structure.
The problem with the change as it affected my organisation was as follows:
- the "Share" button/option was and is the most intuitive way to share a file
- prior to the change the dialog box arrangements meant that people had to intentionally open up sharing beyond the initially intended recipients
- following the change - because of the lack of communication to admins on precisely the implications of the change - staff sharing confidential documents using the same of similar mouse clicks shared documents in a way that broke the confidentiality protocol.
- the change to the dialog boxes/options seems to have been driven by previous inconsistencies in the "Get a link" experience but ended up breaking the more used "Share" experience.
Comments by Erin Scupham & Salvatore Biscari have been useful.
Stephen - you said "In the old sharing dialog, you can copy a restricted link but it assumes you already know who has access and that the person you want to send it to has access. In the new dialogue, we want to make sure that when a user copies or e-mails a link, the recipients will have access. So when the user "copies" a restricted link, we also give them the option to permission new users to the resource."
This is appreciated. However, it is essential that OneDrive for Business doesn't become insecure for users. In our organisation we are in the process of encouraging staff to move their content from Dropbox to OneDrive for Business because it is more secure. We need to ensure that future transitions like the one we are discussing don't have unintended consequences.
- StephenRice
Thanks for all of your feedback. Out of curiosity, did you see the message center announcement that went out on the new sharing dialog? We try and use MC as our mechanism for reaching out to IT but we don't know how visible that actually is to end users. If it's not hitting everyone, we'll continue to explore other ways to spread the message out.
One of the big pieces of feedback we've gotten on what we call the "V2" sharing dialog is that the permission options are not discoverable enough. The effect of this is that users aren't necessarily aware of how they are sharing (which is bad from both a security perspective and from a usability perspective). We've got work coming down the pipeline to address those specific issues.
From a high level point of view, we want OneDrive to be easy to share with out of the box which is why we default to the most permissive option available. To empower IT though, we want to ensure that they can control both the maximum exposure (ex: disable anonymous links entirely) as well as the default exposure (ex: make "direct" links the default method of sharing).
Hope that helps!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
StephenRice wrote:The one difference between this option and the old "restricted" link option is that users have the ability to permission new users at the same time they e-mail or copy the link.
Can you please expand a little about this point?
Thanks.
- StephenRice
Sure. In the old sharing dialog, you can copy a restricted link but it assumes you already know who has access and that the person you want to send it to has access. In the new dialogue, we want to make sure that when a user copies or e-mails a link, the recipients will have access. So when the user "copies" a restricted link, we also give them the option to permission new users to the resource. Hope that helps!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
