Sharing Reports for SharePoint Online

Some SharePoint Online sites are easy to manage when it comes to permissions (especially if there’s no unique permissions on the site). But attempting to find a single place where you can review all the permissions of everything on your site was difficult… until now. If you’re a Site Administrator for a given site, you can use the new Sharing Report to create a spreadsheet of all the permissions on all the items in the site. Here’s how it works and looks…

To run the report (remember, you must be a Site Administrator to do this), go to Site Contents and click on the Site Usage option:

Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the Run Report option. Please note that the report will show *all* permissions, not just external permissions as the screen seems to indicate:

Select the folder in the designated library where the permission spreadsheet will be stored, and click Save. In this example, it will be stored in the Documents library within the Reports folder:

Here’s what the spreadsheet name looks like after the report has been run:

The report creates at least one entry for each list/library/item, and it lists the Resource Path, Item Type, Permission, User Name, User Email, User Or Group Type, Link ID, Link Type, and Access Via Link ID. The items highlighted in yellow are overall permissions for a list/library, and the rows highlighted in green show permissions for a list item, both for standard permissions and for permissions given via a sharing link:

While this spreadsheet could be large for a site that has a lot of unique permissions and link sharing going on, it’s nice to have everything consolidated in a single place that can be analyzed in various ways.