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Björn Nettingsmeier's avatar
Björn Nettingsmeier
Brass Contributor
Jan 10, 2019
Solved

Share to "People with existing access" breaks role inheritance

Hi everyone,   we figured out a behavior with sharing items/documents in SharePoint which from our point of view is a bug.   Let us assume that the user "Jon Doe" is the owner of a SharePoint Sit...
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  • StephenRice's avatar
    StephenRice
    Jan 15, 2019

    Hi all,

     

    The bad news is that this is unexpected. When sharing with a "People with existing access link", it should only send the user a canonical URL and it definitely shouldn't permission the user to the item.

     

    The good news is that a fix is already rolling out and so this should go away shortly :)

     

    Thanks!

     

    Stephen Rice

    OneDrive Program Manager II

StephenRice's avatar
StephenRice
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 30, 2019

Hi Alberto Schiavon,

 

Can you send me a Fiddler trace of the sharing event via private message? This will help us debug and figure out what is happening. Thanks!

 

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

  • ChrisWebbTech's avatar
    ChrisWebbTech
    MVP
    May 02, 2019
    Totally agree as well. I did express this idea to SharePoint Team while in Seattle last month, they liked the idea, hoping they follow through and change it. I said default should be existing access on the copy link button for easy of change, but ideally we should be able to just set the default setting for Share and Copy buttons.

    Anyway, fully support the idea that Copy link should work like it used to when you right click and get a direct link to the document, no permissions changed.
  • Alberto Schiavon's avatar
    Alberto Schiavon
    Brass Contributor
    May 02, 2019

    StephenRice 

     

    Hi Stephen and thanks for your reply.

     

    I have understood a bit better what happens.

    First of all it happens only when "Copy link" is used, because the "Share" button always gives you the option to change the link type before creating the link, independently from the type it uses by default.

    Therefore I can control what's going on, independently from the default link type I get from the SharePoint.

    The "Copy link" instead creates a link immediately, before you change the link type, therefore if the default option turns out to be "People in my organization with the link" the inheritance is broken.

     

    The effective default link type I get seems to depend on a combination of the following settings

    "SharePoint admin > Sharing > Default file and folder links" and the setting "SharePoint admin > Active Sites> select the site > Sharing"

     

    In my case the first setting was "Anyone with the link" and the second was "New and existing guests".

    In this scenario the default link type becomes (unexpectedly) "People in my organization with the link" and when a user clicks on "Copy link" with the intention to send it by email to a person that already has access, he basically breaks the permissions inheritance.

     

    Not sure if this can be considered a bug but for sure I find "copy link" very misleading, especially for my users.

    I believe that Share should be used to grant permissions while Copy link should be used only for copying a link without granting any permissions, as this is the way it is understood by the users.

     

    A possible improvement would be to have to possibility to change the link type before it is created, which is not the case now.

    Thanks,

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