Find anonymously shared documents and folders, and remove permissions

Most organizations that adopt Microsoft 365 do so because of its value as a complete collaborative platform. Today, collaboration in companies of all sizes comprises the digital sharing of documents with internal staff as well as with external stakeholders.

Microsoft 365 gives users several ways to share documents, one of which is by generating an anonymous URL link that gives access to a document or folder to anyone who has the web URL. This method has its uses certainly, but it remains one of the major concerns of administrators because it can be a potential source of data leakage.

While Microsoft does provide the means to turn this feature off, many organizations may not do so because of operational constraints. Or, even if they do close the gate, they may already have an environment full of important documents that are accessible through such links. If you’re interested in best practices, Microsoft has some guidelines on anonymous sharing.

If you have an Azure AD Premium or E5 license you can find shared documents in your tenant using Cloud App Security’ (CAS) via the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center.
The other caveat is that since its data is gathered from the audit log, there may be some delay for newly shared files.

On the other hand, get a sapio365 license and you’ll be able to schedule a recurring report in one click. You can choose to search users’ OneDrives, group document libraries, or all your SharePoint libraries (including groups).

Once the job is finished, you’ll be emailed the results. And if you choose to keep the results window open, you’ll even be able to select and delete the anonymous links (shown below as 1) while still keeping all other sharing permissions of those documents intact, so that whoever had access to them will continue to do so. Mass modification in sapio365 is always a 2-step process so you always have a chance to review your changes before you save them (2).

Getting an overview of all your files in one place, as well as the means to make mass changes are just two of the many ways sapio365 gives you mastery over your content.

Besides using filters and categorizations to make sense of document information, you can also analyze file data with built-in statistics, or even create a chart to use in your next report.

Your imagination is the limit!