External and sharing access report

What is the External and Sharing Access report?

The External and Sharing Access report, one of more than 140 prebuilt reports in SharePoint Manager Plus, gives you visibility into every file, folder, and site within your SharePoint Online environment that has been shared with external users or through sharing links. It includes the site that hosts the shared object, the name of the object, the object type, the location of the object within SharePoint, and the external user or recipient who has access. It also shows guest user identities, link types, and the sharing methods behind each share.

Why you need the External and Sharing Access report

Every time a file is shared with an outside collaborator or a sharing link is generated, your organization extends its perimeter by one more access point. Without a tenant-wide view, these access points pile up across thousands of sites, leaving guest accounts with lingering permissions and anonymous links pointing to documents that should have been locked down long ago.

That exposure is becoming harder to ignore. Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that roughly 60% of breaches involved the human element, and third-party involvement in breaches doubled from 15% to 30%, reinforcing the need to continuously monitor external access and sharing paths.

IT teams without a consolidated sharing report are forced to run site-level reports one at a time, piece together findings from the Site usage dashboard, or maintain PowerShell scripts that compile external sharing data. Even after all that effort, the resulting view is often outdated by the time it lands in a reviewer's inbox.

The External and Sharing Access report gives you that visibility in one place, helping you stay ahead of oversharing instead of investigating it after the fact:

• Detect oversharing of sensitive content: Spot files and folders that have been shared with too many external recipients or through anonymous links and act on them before the content travels further.
• Audit guest user access at scale: Identify every guest who currently holds access to your sites and items, including users invited long ago who no longer need access.
• Revoke lingering or anonymous sharing links: Find sharing links that should have expired, including ones created by users who have left the organization.
• Strengthen your compliance posture: Maintain a clear, auditable record of external access for internal reviews, regulator requests, and security investigations.
• Detect unusual sharing patterns: Catch spikes in external sharing activity that may indicate a compromised account, a misconfigured workflow, or a user circumventing collaboration policies.

Compliance standards supported by the External and Sharing Access report

Organizations across industries are subject to information security standards such as ISO/IEC 27001, NIST SP 800-53, HIPAA, SOX, and the GDPR, many of which include access control requirements that call for organizations to document, review, and restrict who has access to sensitive data.

The External and Sharing Access report supports these efforts by giving administrators a tenant-wide view of every file, folder, and site that has been shared with external users in SharePoint. This visibility helps teams demonstrate that external access is regularly reviewed, that the principle of least privilege is being applied, and that the sharing of sensitive content aligns with internal policies—all of which are common expectations in major access control frameworks.

What does the External and Sharing Access report show?

Using SharePoint Manager Plus, you can filter the External and Sharing Access report with the following fields:

• Farm:Select the specific tenant where you want to analyze external sharing activity across SharePoint Online.
• Site: Narrow the report to one or more specific SharePoint sites to review external sharing within a defined scope, such as a department or project site.

The External and Sharing Access report displays the following details for every shared object:

Native SharePoint admin portals and PowerShell vs. SharePoint Manager Plus

In the SharePoint admin center, you can open the Site usage dashboard and pull per-site sharing reports, or browse the Data access governance reports for high-level counts of shared content. To go any deeper, you may need to rely on SharePoint Online Management Shell or PnP PowerShell scripts that crawl every site and aggregate the results.

PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph API close some of those gaps by retrieving sharing configurations across every site and exposing details such as the link expiration and password protection. Yet the moment you want to schedule a report on the output, share it with stakeholders, or act on a specific share, you often need additional scripts and more tool switching, which is exactly what SharePoint Manager Plus removes.

Benefits of SharePoint Manager Plus' External and Sharing Access report over SharePoint reports

With SharePoint Manager Plus, the External and Sharing Access report gets the power and granularity of PowerShell with the convenience of an admin center.

For a more detailed comparison, check out this page on how to share files with external users in SharePoint.

Features that enhance the External and Sharing Access report

SharePoint Manager Plus provides several built-in tools to help you automate reviews, share findings, and act on access risks surfaced by the External and Sharing Access report:

• Exportable reports: Download reports in CSV, PDF, HTML, or XLSX format for sharing with security reviewers, data protection officers, or auditors and for maintaining offline records for compliance.
• Automated report generation: Schedule the External and Sharing Access report to be generated daily, weekly, or monthly so that external sharing audits run on their own, without manual effort.
• SharePoint alerts for unusual external sharing: Configure real-time alerts to notify admins when external sharing crosses a defined threshold, when anonymous links are created on sensitive sites, or when a single user shares an unusual number of items in a short window.
• Revoking access in bulk: Act on reports directly by removing user and group access across multiple files, folders, or sites in the same interface, without jumping into individual site settings.
• Custom fields and filters: Customize the fields and filters you need, then save the report to generate it again anytime with just a click.

Reports that complement the External and Sharing Access report

If you are auditing how content leaves your SharePoint environment, the External and Sharing Access report works best alongside other governance and access reports in SharePoint Manager Plus. Together they give you a complete picture of who can reach what, how they got that access, and what they are doing with it.

• Anonymously Shared Items report: List files and folders currently shared through Anyone links so you can quickly identify high-risk content that may be accessible beyond authenticated users, then take action before it is overshared.
• Expired Anonymously Shared Items report: Identify files and folders that were shared through anonymous links that have already expired, helping you review stale external access paths and confirm that temporary sharing links are no longer usable.
• List Wise External Users report: View the external users associated with each SharePoint list, helping you identify which lists are exposed to guest access and review whether that access is still appropriate.
• SharePoint permission reports: See the underlying permissions assigned across sites, libraries, and items, helping you correlate external sharing with the unique and inherited permissions that allow it.

Other features of SharePoint Manager Plus

• SharePoint management: Grant, remove, or copy SharePoint permissions and manage group members in bulk without relying on complex scripts, simplifying your SharePoint administration.
• SharePoint reporting: Access over 140 prebuilt and custom reports for SharePoint, including on permissions, site usage, the content inventory, and security insights—all from a centralized dashboard.
• SharePoint auditing: Maintain a comprehensive, searchable audit trail of all activities across your SharePoint environment, including user actions, permission changes, and content modifications.
• SharePoint alerting: Get real-time alerts on critical events such as permission changes, suspicious user activities, site access anomalies, and policy violations.
• Delegated administration: Empower help desk technicians with granular, role-based access for performing specific SharePoint administration tasks, without elevating native privileges.
• SharePoint migration: Simplify SharePoint migration by enabling seamless content and permission migration across sites and tenants, with minimal downtime and full visibility into the migration progress.