"Share with people in org" results in cluttered Shared with me view

[bart_vermeersch]

We like the new sharing dialog a lot but we found a major drawback.

In the past a document was shared with person A, who forwards it to person B who couldn't open the document because he lacked permissions. 

So we suggest our users now to use "Share with organization" as much as possible to avoid this inconvenience.

The major problem, we dont know if it is by design, all these shared files seems to appear in everyone's Shared with me view; resulting in a cluttered unusable view.

Thanks!

[#2]

Yeah, it's by design because these views are built using search/graph API for any documents you have access too that are Shared. Would be nice if this view was updated to not show those unless you click the document to access it then it show up. 

 I dunno, I'm kind of with you on this I feel that shouldn't show files shared with that option, but from a Back end perspective that view  doesn't look at how files are Shared, it just looks if you have access to a document or not, then shows it so not exactly sure how they could fix that without completely changing how that view works. 

[#3]

Hi @bart_vermeersch,

Can you answer a few questions to make sure I understand what's going on? You're creating a link that works for people in your organization, right? And when you share, are you sending it to just Person B or is it going to a security group containing multiple people? 

The way things are supposed to work: A link that works for people in your organization will only show up in your Shared With Me view if the link was actually sent to you. Thanks! 

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

[#4]

Cool Stephen, I was wondering if it worked that way or just worked based off search permissions. I'm going to go run a test with someone and see what happens as well.

[#5]

@Deleted, great! Let me know how it goes 🙂

Stephen Rice

[#6]

Oh ok, I see how it works and why I myself was confused because the old school SHarePoint in me thought you guys were slapping on a "Everyone except External Access" group onto the item when choosing that option, but it's actually doing a link method where you only can access with org login. Makes sense now, in this case, yeah this shouldn't show up in the Shared with me view!

[#7]

Test, working as intended. If it didn't work that way, the Shared with me view would probably be enormous :). Bart let us know how you guys are sharing that out exactly so maybe we can see whats going on.

[#8]

@Deleted, yep, that's correct! The sharing model now has two pieces: Permissions and Links. Permissions are the classic model for how sharing works. Links are objects that have a permission and a scope/audience but require the recipient to actually possess the link to access it. I highly recommend watching Eugene's talk from Ignite 2017 if you want to learn more!

[#9]

I almost got confused here lol.

To sum this up, like it has always been, an item will appear on a users shared with me page if it has been shared with the user explicitly, right? If i share a file with a security group that has 5 users, this file would not appear on the shared with me page of any of these users.

I hope this hasn't changed.

Thanks,

Priyank

[#10]

I almost got confused here lol.

To sum this up, like it has always been, an item will appear on a users shared with me page if it has been shared with the user explicitly, right? If i share a file with a security group that has 5 users, this file would not appear on the shared with me page of any of these users.

I hope this hasn't changed.

Thanks,

Priyank

[#11]

Pretty sure that's still the same as you describe. I was just tossing out an idea which was obviously wrong, going to remove my previous post ;P.

[#12]

@Deleted, that is correct, yes. Thanks,

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

[#13]

Hello @StephenRice, thanks for following up!

We did share it by creating and using a link for everyone. I'm positive we didn't share it with all 15K+ accounts "Separately". No emails were received for the shared items. We did this for 20 png images in the siteassets library.

These "anonymous" links were used in a SharePoint list (which is crawled) and the images are displayed in a Content Search Web Part. Could it be that by surfacing those anonymous links on a web page, they are added to the "Shared with me"?

We now have removed all those links, removed all permissions but the png's remain visible (after a couple of weeks) in everyone's "Shared with me". Clicking them or trying to remove from Shared list results in an error. For this we opened a premier support ticket.

Maybe it's possible to revise the "Remove from Shared list" so it can remove/hide items from the Shared list when it returns the error "Item hasn't been shared or isn't shared"

I hope it's clear.

Bart

[#14]

Yea using those files as links causes people to access the documents so it adds them to their shared with view.

I have that problem with the shared with after files get removed too. Assuming it’s a bug but usually you can delete and you get an error but they end up going away.

[#15]

Can OneDrive be a replacement for file server?

[#16]

You can rig it to be, but SharePoint online is recommended for larger storage and files due to management etc. Neither option is a true network drive replacement since you will always need some form of file system around for older apps that require network paths to access etc. and can't access OneDrive / SharePoint. But for a general use network drive, yes either can work, but technically SharePoint libraries are to be used for Teams, OneDrive for Inidividuals.

[#17 · Accepted solution]

@bart_vermeersch,

Thanks for following up! My guess is that adding the anonymous link to the web part is what caused the issue. We don't recommend using the anonymous link for that type of scenario. 

There's also a known issue around SWM not updating after losing access (or at least it taking a while). Stay tuned for more info.

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

[#18]

Hello @StephenRice

Thanks for the feedback. Using anonymous links was indeed a poor choice, we changed the setup and set the correct SharePoint permissions so we hope to benefit from CDN as well using direct links https://tenant.sharepointcom/siteassets/folder/image.png

Is there anything we can do or ask support to do to remove all the old shared files from the SWM of our 15K users. After a month the're still there, I think Support prefers to avoid full rebuild/crawl of the tenant.

[#19]

Yeah your best bet is just slap “everyone” permission group direct on your item then you can link to it instead of generating link.

[#20]

@Deleted, @bart_vermeersch,

Before you slap the everyone permission onto an item, make sure that the item is mean to be available to all users in your company as well as all guests in your company (including new guests as they are invited).

I would reach out to support for the SWM case for now. We're doing some work in this area as well to make the experience better but there isn't a specific timeframe just yet. Thanks!

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II