New: Automate external sharing reviews in ShareGate Apricot

In this release, we’ve made it easy to stay on top of external sharing, with smart monitoring and automated reviews—giving you full visibility into who’s shared what, when, and with whom.

Related reading: the ultimate guide to Office 365 external sharing for IT Admins

We get it: enabling external sharing in Office 365 can be a bit daunting. Intellectual property could be lost. External users could have access to things they shouldn’t. It feels counterintuitive to let employees share files externally to keep your company data more secure, right? 

Thing is, if you don’t make it easy for employees to collaborate with people outside of your organization—think customers, suppliers, or freelancers—they’ll find a way to do it anyway.

Your data will wind up being shared in Google Docs. It’ll be sent to an insecure fax machine (because in some places those still exist). Users will send it by carrier pigeon if they aren’t getting what they need from your corporate tools. Think about it this way: it’s hard to protect something if you don’t know where it is. 

At ShareGate, we want to help you feel confident about turning on external sharing. That’s why we provide you with governance tools that give you full visibility into what’s happening and help you stay in control. So you can allow your users the freedom to share documents and be sure sensitive information is kept secure. 

Introducing external sharing reviews
in ShareGate Apricot

Securing content is a whole lot easier when you can see everything that’s been shared externally. But the truth is there’s simply no easy way to list all the links to files shared externally for each of your Microsoft Teams or Office 365 Groups without a ton of grunt work. 

That’s why we’re excited to launch external sharing monitoring and reviews in ShareGate Apricot, giving you full visibility into who’s shared what, when, and with whom.

Simply connect your tenant to our software to see every single link to files shared externally by each of your teams and groups. We do all the heavy lifting for you—no need to code, script, search audit logs, or manually pull reports anymore. 

Try ShareGate Apricot in your tenant for free.

Get started

Get full visibility into what’s been
shared externally

Quickly see which teams or groups have shared content externally, and click on each one to view a complete list of shared files. Even better, as an IT admin you can revoke access to sensitive files yourself in one click—without having to be an owner of the group.

Collaborate with group owners to answer
the hard questions

Great! You’ve got a list of all the links to files shared externally for each team. Now what? Should the file called Budget-forecast_project-falcon2019.xls still be shared externally?  

What’s actually harder than pulling up a list of external sharing links is figuring out if those files should be shared, or in some cases should still be shared. There’s only one way to do this, and it’s pretty painful: ask every group owner directly. After all, it’s their file—so they should know.  

ShareGate Apricot saves you the trouble of contacting every single owner to validate which links should still be shared. We notify them directly by email and ask them to confirm on behalf of their group. Owners can delete links to sensitive files through our easy-to-use interface instead of having to go to each of their SharePoint team sites to revoke access. 

Perform external sharing reviews regularly, thanks to automation

You might have heard of access reviews in Office 365. It’s a feature that comes with Azure AD Premium P2 subscriptions that enables you to regularly validate membership. 

But what about external sharing reviews? That’s the process of confirming that every single link to files shared externally should still, in fact, be shared. Sound tedious? That’s because it is.

First, you have to figure out which groups have shared content externally. Then, you need to list all external sharing links by group and send that list to the owners to validate—after all, they’re the ones who know best. Finally, you’ll want to track if owners did their job and log any changes for compliance and internal auditing reasons.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the real kicker is that you can’t just go through that whole process once and be done. To keep your data secure and ensure external users have access to the right things, you need to repeat this process on an ongoing basis. 

We’ve got a better way: schedule external sharing reviews in ShareGate Apricot. Set a time interval at which you’d like those reviews to take place (say, every 90 days), set a start date, and off you go! Done.

ShareGate Apricot automates this complex, multi-step process for you. That way, you can perform reviews more regularly and keep your data secure over time—giving you greater peace of mind. 

Track the progress of your reviews to ensure everyone stays on top of security

Once an external sharing review has started, you can track its progress and view your results at the end. You can also check which owners haven’t completed their reviews and follow up with them if needed. Throughout the process, we log every action taken during those reviews—so you can easily perform internal audits. 

More to come in 2020

It’s been a big year for us with the launch of ShareGate Apricot. In the past eight months, we’ve: 

• Released a way for you clean up old teams and Office 365 Groups 
• Made it easy for you to find orphaned groups and promote a new owner 
• Given you the possibility to archive your groups’ files and folders on your own secure Azure storage 
• Simplified external sharing reviews 

We’re excited for what’s coming next! 

To learn more about Microsoft Teams and Office 365 governance, check out ShareGate Apricot. If you’re already a ShareGate Apricot customer, get started with external sharing reviews by taking a look at our documentation to learn how to set them up!