The options for sharing documents and files will be changing over the next twelve months for the Office 365 apps, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive.
Year of Sharing
The whole suite of changes is what Microsoft is grandly calling the ‘Year of Sharing’.
That’s overstating things because there’s little or no feature changes in what’s been announced. This whole thing is about changing the sharing dialogs to make them easier to use.
The changes will happen over time with Microsoft getting feedback at each step.
As usual, Microsoft is cagey about which customers will be getting these changes. They seem to be mainly for Microsoft 365 hosted organizations. They might be available, in a limited form, to small businesses, families and other consumer level paying customers.
Share menu changes
The most obvious change will be the Share menu.
Instead of opening a Share menu directly, there’ll be options. This change seems aimed at pushing Teams onto the Share menu.
Quick Permissions
The main Share dialog will change to show the ‘Can edit’ or ‘Can View’ (Read only) options on a drop-down menu rather than in a separate dialog.
Changes to expiration date and password are still available via the Link settings.
Copy Link improvements
Copying a link to send via messaging, email etc has been in Microsoft 365 for a while.
At the moment, the permissions (edit/read only, who can access etc) are set into the link. If you need to change the permissions, the old link has to be cancelled and a new link (with new permissions) sent out.
That will change so the link permissions can be changed at any time without resending the link. A Link Setting dialog will show the current permissions and let them be changed.
Shared with display and Manage access
It will be easier to see who has access to a file or document with the new Shared with: display at the bottom of sharing dialog.
Clicking that list opens a Manage Access dialog with People, Groups and Links tabs.
The Links tab is very welcome. It shows where a document has been shared from Office apps, Teams, SharePoint or OneDrive.
People list shows each person who can access the file and allows individual changes to access.
You’ll also be able to see which group/s a person belongs to and links shared with them.
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