External sharing of folders in Sharepoint Online - restrictions and notifications

[sumo83]

Hi experts,... I have two quite basic questions,,,

1 - I want to change the external sharing permission -> in Policy -> Sharing, I want to configure a group of ppl that are allowed to share externally (Allow only users in specific security group to share externally)... Would that affect folders/files that are already shared - I expect it will not but not sure as there are some critical folders shared already

2 - is there a way to generate an email notification when a sharepoint item (page, file, folder) i shared externally?

thank you in advance.

[#2]

no one had to deal with this yet? :)...

1 - so from what I've read... changing these should not affect existing sharing and will be in place for any new one... Will enable it and will see :)

2 - I've found a way to implement it - MS Purview -> Policies -> Alert Policies - and I have created a new one with Activity is ExternalFileSharing ...but when I've tried to share via link with external user, no alert was generated... Anyone has experience with this?

[#3]

Hi @sumo83 - What is the threshold for triggering your alert? Every time or after a certain volume has been reached?

[#4]

Hi @Kelly_Edinger I have it for "every time". See pictures below.

[#5]

Set this up in my dev tenant, getting the same (bad) results as you are. I can't find any documentation stating that it's deprecated. Am still looking into it.

[#6]

thanks for looking into this!... appreciate it.

I've found a user who mentioned the same issue.... for his testing, the alert was triggered when item was shared via "anonymous link", and no alert generated when shared with "specific ppl". I can't test it as Anonymous sharing is disabled in our organization.

After enabling "SharePoint and OneDrive integration with Microsoft Entra B2B", alerts were triggered for both sharing options... So maybe enabling B2B integration is a MUST to get it working properly?

[#7]

@Kelly_Edinger 

so when I'm checking Activities, I do not see "secure link" option there... which should be the event generated when sharing with specific ppl (SecureLinkCreated)...

There is this activity called "Shared file externally" which is checking for "ExternalFileSharing " event, but when I ran audit in Purview on last 30 days sharepoint logs, got ZERO results.... so looks like that event is not generated at all .... and maybe starts to be visible after B2B integration enabled.... 

So .. I'm going to do some research on B2B Entra integration and see whether I can safely enabled it and see if alerts would work then... :)

[#8]

Would love to hear what you find out