Let the right one in (your SharePoint site)

What do you do when you receive a request for access to your SharePoint site? Accept it immediately (because you want to be done with it, or you feel a bit ashamed that you have excluded someone) or find out exactly what they want because there may be more to the request than meets the eye?

Yes, I thought so.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into Access Requests. There’s quite a lot you can do with them, including creating unique permissions. You know that I hate that!

Microsoft explains this in detail  but of course they  they let you figure out all the implications by yourself. Or by me :-).

If your email address is in the Access Request Settings, you will receive access requests via email, and the requests will be replicated in the Site settings > Access Requests and Invitations page.

How does it work?

When you get the access request in your mail, you will see the link to the desired content. You can immediately click the “Accept” button from the email and give them Contribute permissions by default.

Yes, Contribute. That means they can edit the content.

Hmmm, perhaps clicking Accept immediately is not such a good idea after all. Perhaps Read-permissions are good enough. Or, if you have sent this link assuming they had access, it may be a good idea to give them access to the complete site.

Alternative: the Access Requests and Invitations page!

So, here comes the Access Requests and Invitations page to look at (and manage) the request.

You will see three categories: Pending requests, External user invitations and History.

Here again, you can click Approve or Decline, or check first what will happen if you click Approve. So, click the … next to the name of the requester. This pop up opens:

Here you see some more info:

• What Office365 has decided about their permissions. In this case Office365 would add them as an individual to this document with Contribute permissions – most unpleasant!
  You can click the drop down to select the Contributors or Visitors group for the site.
• Who has asked access and what exactly for. Hover over the link to see the URL.
• Date and time of the request
• Approval state
• Email conversation with the person who requests access. You see I was busy writing this post, so the impatient Mystery Guest asked for permissions again

What would have happened…

If I had clicked Accept from the email or Approve from the Access Request page, this is what would have happened:

Exception: Site welcome page

There is one exception to this rule and that is when you send the link to the welcome page of the site. In that case the requester is added by default to the Members group. This also may be more than you want, though.

History

After approval, the request ends up under “Show History”. This gives a nice overview of everything that has happened in your site.
If you see a name very often, it may be an idea to give them access to the whole site.

Recommendation

When you receive an Access Request it may be better to spend some time figuring out the details, than to click Accept immediately. This will cost you some time now, but will save you time fixing unique permissions later (and dealing with even more access requests because too many inheritances are broken!).

Have you found any other “interesting” behavior of the Access Request?

Title based on the movie “Let the right one in“.

Image courtesy of cbenjasuwan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net