Set Default Sharing to "People with Existing Access"

Hi TedLarsen 

Great question - can you set a default sharing setting for every new team you create?

For files you can use the SharePoint admin > Policies > Sharing > File and folder links menu item that is available here

https://<yourTenantName>-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/AdminHome.aspx#/sharing

Here you can set the tenant and onedrive default External sharing (we use "new and existing guests") AND the "File and folder links" options. You can choose between "Only people in your organisation" (we use this setting) or "Specific people (only the people the user specifies)" (we manually set this for some teams).

If you need to alter external guest access to the team e.g. email address removed for privacy reasons you need to do that via the TEAMS admin center policies.

I hope this helps.

Dorje-McKinnon 

Sorry for bumping this old thread.  Thanks again for providing this script, this was helpful in changing all 400 of our sites default to "Existing Access" as promised.   I now would like to know if Microsoft will provide a way to have this be the default when a new Team is created, automatically (without having to manually change it in the admin portal).    Is this something that is already possible and I"m missing it, or is Microsoft still working on that functionality?

HiDorje-McKinnon 

Thank you so much for your help and your detailed description. It worked perfectly when I added your changes!

I wish you a great day and thank you again for your help. You have saved me a lot of headaches and broken nerves

Hi StephanArco 

Thanks for letting me know about the problem.

It seems that the way set-pnpsite interprets the -identity value may have changed.

When i run the code I posted it doesn't work any longer.

If you change 

• Set-PNPsite -identity $site -DefaultLinkToExistingAccess $true
  to 
• Set-PNPsite -identity $site.url -DefaultLinkToExistingAccess $true

In my testing this change worked.

Below is how I came to that conclusion

I then added in the following to figure out what might be happening

#following row was in original code

$SitesInTenant = Get-PnPTenantSite -Template GROUP#0

#new row to check there are some sites in the variable

$SitesInTenant.count

#then I just want to see what type of thing the $site variable will be so I do the following

ForEach($Site in $SitesInTenant)
{

$site

}

#I got back the following, a big list all like this

#Url Template LocaleId
#--- -------- --------
#https://mycompany.sharepoint.com/sites/teamsiteName GROUP#0 5129

#Then I did the following to look at one item

write-host $SitesInTenant[0]

#I got back  

#PnP.PowerShell.Commands.Model.SPOSite

#this tells me that the $site variable is an object

#so then I used the information from this testing to do the following 

ForEach($Site in $SitesInTenant)
{

write-host $site.url

}

#to conclude I think the following will work note I changed $site to $site.url

ForEach($Site in $SitesInTenant)
{

#reference https://pnp.github.io/powershell/cmdlets/Set-PnPSite.html#-defaultlinktoexistingaccess

Set-PNPsite -identity $site.url -DefaultLinkToExistingAccess $true

#write-host $site.url

}

Dorje-McKinnon

Hi Dorje

Thank you very much for script. However I tried your script and I get this error message for each instance:

Set-PNPsite : Invalid URI: The format of the URI could not be determined.
At line:19 char:1
+ Set-PNPsite -identity $site -DefaultLinkToExistingAccess $true
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (:) [Set-PnPSite], PSInvalidOperationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvalidOperation,PnP.PowerShell.Commands.Site.SetSite

When I enter the URL of the Site directly instead of the $Site variable it works fine. Also I checked the contend of the $Site variable and it inherits the right URL. Therefore I am very confused of this error message as the URL should be correct.

Thank you for your help!

Best

Stephan

Hi LisaJo48 ,

My previous comment was pointing you to creating your own code that did 2 things:

- get a list of all the sites in your tenant

- then for each one of those set the following 

Something like the following| NOTE check this with ONE or two sites first, before doing it across all 800 of your sites.

 Import-Module Microsoft.Online.Sharepoint.PowerShell -DisableNameChecking

#change XXXX for your tenant name     
 $AdminSiteURL="https://xxxx-admin.sharepoint.com"
     
 $Credential = Get-credential
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $AdminSiteURL -Interactive
     
 #sharepoint online list all site collections powershell
#Get All Group Sites
 $SitesInTenant = Get-PnPTenantSite -Template GROUP#0

#for each site then set the property you want
 ForEach($Site in $SitesInTenant)
 {

#reference https://pnp.github.io/powershell/cmdlets/Set-PnPSite.html#-defaultlinktoexistingaccess

Set-PNPsite -identity $site.url -DefaultLinkToExistingAccess $true

}

NOTE - set-pnpsite code updated 24 Nov to be $site.url

Reference for this is here

https://pnp.github.io/powershell/cmdlets/Set-PnPSite.html#-defaultlinktoexistingaccess

Thank you Dorje-McKinnon, I have the code that you referenced; however, this command requires that a specific site in the tenant ("YourSite" portion) which means that I would need to run the command for each site [collection], one at a time. This is what I want to avoid. I would like to know of a PS command that will set ALL site [collections] in our tenant to 'people with existing access'. 

Are you saying that my interpretation of this command is incorrect and it, actually, does affect all sites in a tenant simultaneously? If not, I am looking for a command that does. 

Hi LisaJo48 ,

You can do this using PowerShell in a couple of different ways.

If you use Sensitivity labels you can use those to define the type of sharing for each site. More info here https://office365itpros.com/2021/06/08/default-sharing-link-settings/ 

If you want to set every site to a specific type of sharing you can do that using the following powershell

Set-SPOSite -identity https://YourTenant.sharepoint.com/sites/YourSite -DefaultLinkToExistingAccess 1

Reference https://lightningtools.com/blog/sharepoint-default-sharing-link-people-with-existing-access

You or your IT team should be able to adapt the following, to run the above script for everyone of your sites if that is what you want to do.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/616205/change-default-34site-sharing-settings34-for-new-s.html

I hope this helps.