Hi @MatthewBrockway,
Thanks for all of your feedback below! Hopefully I can shed some light on the issues you've mentioned.
1) As we looked at the previous sharing experience, we found that one of the main causes of confusion in our sharing model was that we had tied the ability to "share via e-mail" (i.e. "I want to share a document and send the recipient an e-mail") with a requirement that you "invite" (i.e. I want to explicitly give User A access to the resource). With the new model, we wanted to separate these concepts. The idea is that the user first picks if they want to e-mail the resource to the user (Originally we called this e-mail a link but we settled back on 'share' based on user feedback) and then picks the type of link they want to share. By clicking the blue link in the new dialogue (lots of feedback that this link isn't discoverable so we'll be addressing this in a future update), the user can select the type of link they want: anyone with the link (e.g. anonymous access link), people in my organization (e.g. internal or company shareable link) or specific people (e.g. the old "invite" flow).
2. From talking with users, another insight we had was that users tend to fall into two "buckets" of thought. The majority of users think of "sharing" in what I think of was the "web" or "attachment" model which is something like "I want to send Document X to User A". The sharing dialog covers this case. The other type of user though thinks in the more classic SharePoint model which is "I want to add User A to the permission list of Document X". This is the "add people" flow in the Details pane. We want to make this flow easier as well in the future.
3. This one was our bad. We rolled the new sharing dialog out to first release last year and started gathering feedback (ex: whether the entry point was more understandable as "share" or "e-mail a link"). Unfortunately, we also discovered an issue around the new sharing dialog and the "Shared With Me" view. We had to pause rollout while we addressed this issue; I believe this is now fixed which is why we've resumed rolling the feature out.
We're continuing to iterate and evolve our sharing experiences and you should see the fruit of that labor later this year. If you have any other feedback on the new sharing dialog, please let me know and I'll make sure it gets circulated around the product team. Thanks!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
