Wednesday 31 July 2019

Provide Anonymous User Access to Office 365 SharePoint Files for Specific Duration

In this post, let us look at giving the access to the files for specified interval. This requirement might be very useful in several aspects. Say for example, the scenario could be like the form/documents that needs to be filled within the specified deadline once generated.

Giving access doesn't mean working with file/item level permissions. This approach provides ways to generate links for SharePoint files with necessary permissions, that could be accessible for sometime.

In the previous article, we have seen ways to create and share links, which is scoped to users/groups/anonymous users.

Microsoft has recently released an update, which has new set of actions. One such feature is stop sharing an item or file action.


Provide Access for Specified Time (Stop Sharing File)


From the previous post, we will go one more step ahead in revoking the provided access and sending out notification to user on the same.

Here 3 more actions are added.
  • Delay: As per requirements, provide a delay/wait time for flow to pause.
  • Stop sharing an item or folder: Revoke all the previously shared links.
  • Send an email : Notification to say the permissions has been revoked.

Note: Stop sharing an item or folder, revokes/removes all the previously shared links, irrespective of any scope and target audience. So for example, let us consider previously two type of scoped links are created and shared for an item/folder. Executing stop sharing action will revoke/remove all the share links for that particular item/folder.

Saturday 20 July 2019

Create and Share Scoped Links of SharePoint Files to Users using Microsoft Flow

Assume a file is getting generated/getting created by users on the SharePoint online platforms. The business wants to share the file links with the targeted groups/users, which is view-able or editable. This business process is automated using SharePoint’s in-built sharing feature and Microsoft Flow.

SharePoint online has an inbuilt share feature, for creating links for items/files on it’s platform (At the end of this article, this OOB share feature snapshot is shown for reference). The scope of this feature is available in the following levels.
  • Anonymous
  • Organization
  • Specific people

Microsoft Flow has a SharePoint action called “create sharing link feature for a file or folder”. At the time of writing, this action has the following scopes only.
  • Anonymous
  • Organization
Note: 
  • The type of access could be either 
    • view and edit
    • or, view
  • There is no scope for sharing it to specific people.