Microsoft Plans New Share Experiences Across Microsoft 365
- Paul Thurrott
- Jun 02, 2021
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11
Microsoft revealed that it is making changes to how sharing works across Microsoft 365 collaboration solutions like Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint.
“The Share dialog appears in more than 40 areas of Microsoft 365 and is accessed about 400 million times a month,” Microsoft’s Ankita Kirti explains. “That’s why we’ve been gathering feedback and capturing data to understand how you collaborate—and more specifically, how you share and work together with teammates on files—so we can make the right investments to make sharing options more intuitive across Microsoft 365 apps and make collaborating easier for you.”
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Over the next year, which, granted, is a long time, Microsoft plans to make the following feedback-based changes to how sharing works across Microsoft 365:
Quick permissions. This one is available now. When you select Share and enter a recipient’s name or email address in the “To” field, you no longer have to go into Link settings to select a permission level, but you can instead select it directly from a drop-down menu next to their name. Likewise, there’s now an additional entry point to Link settings from the Quick permissions dropdown that provides more granular sharing control for link types and permissions.
Copy link. When you set link permissions today and select the Copy link button, you see a confirmation window with an auto-generated link that you can copy and share with your team. But it doesn’t let you change link permissions, so you have to create a new link. In the coming year, this will change. Instead of a Copy link button, there will be a footer that lets you set permissions for the link and then copy it to share it with others. And if you need to update the link permissions, you can do so directly from the Link Created dialog too.
Shared with dialog and Manage Access settings. Microsoft will roll out changes to the Shared with dialog and Manage Access settings later this year. The Share with dialog will display a list of everyone who has access to the selected file and let you see how many people have access to the file. When you make a selection from that list, Manage Access settings appears, giving you more control over how files are shared. This experience will be made more efficient and easily accessible, Microsoft says.
Share menu. The menu that appears when you select Share—at the top of the page in OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams, and in the top-right corner in Office applications—will “soon” be updated to provide contextual choices like Email, Copy link, and Teams. And once you have shared something this way, the menu will display an option to select Manage access settings for additional sharing controls.