This article will discuss how SharePoint admins and SharePoint site owners can change the expiration for sharing links (for guests).
SharePoint Owners
Experience for those who share
Once the expiration limits have been out in place, both site owners and guests will “feel” the consequences. Since the above settings impact SharePoint and OneDrive externally shared content, the corresponding impact will be described below.
Experience for SharePoint Site Owners
- If you are a site owner, click Gear Icon > Site Permissions
- You will notice a message/warning displaying a notice about the set limit and the ability to manage it. Click Manage.
- On the next screen, it will list all the external users (guests) and advise you on the date their access will expire. You will have a chance to either extend it or remove it altogether.
- If you decide to extend it, it will automatically extend to the maximum period allowed/set within the SharePoint Admin Center. For example, if your limit is 30 days, it will add 30 days to today’s date and will extend access for the user until that future date.
- In addition, 21 days before the expiration date, Site Owners will receive an email warning them about the soon to be expired guests
- And they will also see a similar warning message on their SharePoint sites, warning them about pending expiration for guest users. By clicking Manage they will be able to extend access as shown above.
Experience for OneDrive users
You will also be able to control similar settings on your own OneDrive for Business. To do this:
- From within OneDrive, click Gear Icon > OneDrive Settings
- Click More Settings, Manage guest expiration, and then you will be able to manage Access Expiration for your guests in OneDrive!
Experience for Guests
Guests will lose access to the content when the guest access limit is reached and will need to receive a new invitation from the Site Owners or OneDrive users to the content.
SharePoint Admins
Global Level
Globally, within the SharePoint Admin Center, you can set up expiration limits for both SharePoint and OneDrive. To do this:
- Click on Office 365 App Launcher > Admin
- Under Admin Centers, choose SharePoint
- Under Policies, select Sharing
- Expand "More external sharing settings" drop-down, and you will see two options at the very bottom
Guest access to a site or OneDrive will expire automatically after this many days
This option sets the threshold for external access to the whole SharePoint site or individual files and folders located on the SharePoint site or OneDrive for Business. You can set it to be any number between 30 and 730 days (2 years).
People who use a verification code must authenticate after this many days
This is an extra option you can set for authentication via passcode. This mainly applies to situations when you share files and folders from a site or OneDrive and when the recipient does not have an Office 365 account of its own. In those cases, they will access the content via temporary passcode. The process is documented here. The threshold here can be anywhere between 1 and 365 days (1 year).
Site Level
Likewise, you can specify external sharing limits at a site level as well. This allows the SharePoint admins to set different limits to different sites (i.e., 30 days to HR sites and 90 days to Operations sites) or eliminate the expiration limit. To set the expiration limit at a site level:
- Under Sites, click Active Sites
- Click the checkbox next to a site whose limit you want to alter, then click Sharing
- Scroll down to the "Expiration of Guest Access" section. You will see a checkbox next to "Same as organization-level setting" checked.
- Uncheck that checkbox above. You will either set a different limit for the site or eliminate the expiration of access.
Sources
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