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Permissions and Sharing
SharePoint Online permissions can be as simple or as complicated as you like. By default, the following permissions groups are available in SharePoint Online:
- Site Owners: full control permissions - responsible for the structure, usage and permissions within the site; for managing access and permissions, site-level navigation (web parts), all structures (libraries, folders and document sets) and for all content held in the SPO site
- Site Members: edit permissions - create content, can create and edit documents. Similar to being a "Member" in Microsoft Teams
- Site Visitors: read permissions - can only browse, read and download content if permitted.
When you need more granularity SharePoint Online allows Site Administrators and Site Owners to create additional SharePoint groups in your site and additional custom permission levels to assign to those groups. This allows the fine-tuning of permissions to suit your access control requirements.
More information about sharing permissions can be found on the Microsoft support website
External users will no longer require a temporary separate external account or a virtual card to access the service. Instead they can now collaborate or read content using their own accounts in line with OneDrive and MS Teams.
More information about external sharing can be found on this Microsoft support page
Please refer to this Quick Reference Guide for more information about Permissions and Sharing in SharePoint Online
Power Automate
Microsoft’s Power Automate is a service that helps you create automated workflows in SharePoint and other Nexus365 services that can enable you to simplify business processes and manage them more effectively.
Some examples of things that you can use Power Automate for:
- Automating repetitive business processes
- Sending reminders on tasks
- Moving business data between systems
- Collecting and storing data from forms
- PDF conversion of files in SharePoint Online libraries
- Microsoft Form duplication checking
There is a lot of information online about Power Automate and many examples of flows. A few introductory links are:
Retention and Compliance
For most organisations, including the University, the volume and complexity of their data is increasing daily. Effectively managing this information is important because we need to:
- Comply proactively with industry regulations and internal policies that require you to retain content for a minimum period of time
- Reduce your risk in the event of litigation or a security breach by permanently deleting old content that you’re no longer required to keep
- Help the University to share knowledge effectively by ensuring that our users work only with content that is current and relevant to them
Update, April 2023
There are currently several issues around compliance and retention; the University does not have a single source of unified ownership or guidance, and the tools provided by the current SharePoint Online licence are limited and do not include the event-based triggers that many retention schedules use.
To date, retention and compliance labels and tools are not available in SharePoint Online. Once a way forward is agreed, retention tools will be implemented retrospectively for existing sites, and made available to new sites where required.
