UFIT will be making changes on Feburary 4th, 2025 to default sharing options for Office365. This will include sharing files in OneDrive, Teams, and Sharepoint Online. On February 4th, 2025, UFIT will change the default settings for sharing files to share with “Specific people” and remove the “Share with anyone” option. At that point, the share link for anything “Shared with anyone” will be removed.

You’ll still be able to share with people outside of UF, however. To do this, you will be required to enter their email address when you share the file. Those people will then have ‘guest’ access to the file. Guest access links expire after 30 days (but could be made to expire sooner by you). Guests will also have to authenticate with a Microsoft generated verification code and reauthenticate after 5 days.

From our internal testing and understanding, this should only impact items that are truly shared with anyone. Unfortunately, however, we’ve found that even when you think you purposefully shared with specific people, the share link was actually created with the ‘Share with anyone’ permission instead. This is pretty much items that were uploaded to Microsoft Teams chats or items uploaded to SharePoint from the Outlook attachment interface (where it offers to upload your attachment to SharePoint and share it instead of attaching a copy). There could be other circumstances that also cause this behaviour.

As a result, this will likely impact more items than you think. There is a way to run a sharing report to summarize items you’ve shared and how. Running the sharing report is explained in our KB article: How do I see what files are shared, and to whom, in my OneDrive? Look for anything with a value of “Anyone” in the “Link Type” column of the report.

When I ran the report for myself, I had 748 items with 467 items having “Shared with Anyone” links.

If there are any changes to UFIT’s intended settings change for this, we’ll update this article.