How to find and fix oversharing in SharePoint Online

Transcript

Runtime 5:50. Created by the Cognillo product team. Narrated with an AI-generated voice.

0:00 Thanks for joining. Before we begin, just a disclaimer: this demo was written by the Cognillo team, and this voice-over was AI-generated. In this live demo, we'll cover the tasks people ask us about most: finding oversharing, reviewing who has access, fixing it straight from the report, cleaning up orphaned accounts, and undoing a change from History.

0:22 This is the dashboard. Monitors run on a schedule and track what's changing across your tenant: oversharing, content open to everyone, permission drift, who changed permissions, and storage. Each card shows the trend over recent runs, the biggest offenders, and a shortcut into the full report. On the right, What needs attention lists the issues the latest scan picked up.

0:44 Everything you can run lives under Tasks, grouped by what you're trying to get done. Oversharing, permissions, leavers and new hires, Copilot readiness, storage, broken links, bulk edits, copy and move, and ready-made compliance evidence.

0:58 Not sure where something lives? Just type what you want to do. Remove a user brings up every task that can help, across all the areas.

1:07 Let's start with oversharing, since that's the number one request. There are reports to find it, fixes for links and unique permissions, checks for guests, and a monitor that alerts you when new oversharing appears. We'll open the Sharing links report.

1:22 Pick the sites to scan, here our architecture knowledge base, and narrow it to specific lists if you like. Before anything runs, the summary spells out exactly what the job will do. Reports never change SharePoint on their own. Run it, and the scan works through every list and library. We've sped this part up. It's just over ten thousand items. Jobs run in the background, so you can keep working while they finish.

1:50 Here's every sharing link on the site, grouped by file. You can see the link type, the permission it grants, who it's shared with, and when it expires. A few of these organization-wide links never expire, which is exactly what we want to catch.

2:05 Tick the links you want to fix, and the actions panel opens. You can remove the links, change when they expire, or narrow who they work for. We'll give all three a thirty-day expiry.

2:17 First, you review exactly what will change, link by link. Nothing happens until you apply. Apply it, and the three links are updated in a few seconds. The report updates in place, so you can see the new expiry dates straight away. And every change is logged in History, so it can be undone later.

2:35 Next, the Permissions report. It lists every grant on every site, list, folder and item. Same flow as before: pick the site, check the summary, and run it. Any job can also be saved as a template, put on a schedule, emailed when it finishes, or exported. So the review you run today can run itself every week, and land in your inbox.

3:04 The comprehensive view shows permissions as a tree, from the site right down to individual files. Site admins, SharePoint groups and their permission levels, then every list, flagged when it has unique permissions instead of inheriting from the site.

3:20 Search for a person, and the tree filters to everywhere they have access. Sunanda can read the customer pay codes spreadsheet, through a sharing link.

3:31 Select her, and the actions panel offers to remove just her from the link. The link keeps working for everyone else. Review it, confirm, and her access is gone. Again, it's logged in History and can be undone. No more digging through Manage access on each file to find the right link.

3:50 You don't always need a full report. Explorer lists every site you can reach. Filter, pick a site, and the side panel shows its admins, its groups and members, and anyone with direct access. You can also run any report or task from here, on just the sites you've selected.

4:08 To give someone access, click Add on a group, search your directory, and pick the person. James Smith is now a member of the site, and the confirmation tells you it can be undone from History.

4:20 Now a cleanup task that admins love. Clean up orphaned users finds accounts that were deleted or disabled in your directory, but are still sitting in SharePoint permissions and groups. They're easy to miss, and they clutter every access review. Pick the sites, Boston Team here, and run it.

4:39 It found three: a user, and two deleted domain groups. Select one and remove it. You get a confirmation first. Then the account is deleted from the site's user list, along with any permissions it still held.

4:53 Everything you did is in History. The Changes view lists every permission change, the task that made it, and when. Open one, and the details panel shows who ran it, the scope, and each individual change. You can view it by task or by site, and export the log for your auditors.

5:10 Here's Sunanda's removal from earlier. Undo is available on changes like this: grants, removals, and expiry changes. Deleting a link outright, or narrowing its scope, can't be undone, and the app tells you so. Click Undo, confirm, and her access is restored.

5:27 The undo is recorded in History as a task of its own, so your audit trail stays complete.

5:33 That's SharePoint Essentials Toolkit. Find what's overshared, fix it right from the report, and keep a full history you can undo. To see it running on your own tenant, email hello at cognillo dot com.