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SharePoint Manager Plus provides a comprehensive suite of SharePoint reports, enabling admins to monitor and manage SharePoint permissions more effectively than native tools like PowerShell and the SharePoint admin center. A key report within this suite is the Folder Permissions report.
Why you need a Folder Permissions report
Folders are where the real access sprawl happens in SharePoint and where structure can quickly become unclear as teams create subfolders, share them with external partners, and break inheritance to assign custom permissions. Without a clear view of who can access what at the folder level, sensitive content can quietly drift into the wrong hands. The business impact of poor access governance can be significant. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that the global average cost of a data breach was USD 4.44 million.
The SharePoint admin center can show you site-level permissions and PowerShell can pull folder access on demand, but neither gives you a clean, tenant-wide report focused specifically on folder permissions. A Folder Permissions report closes this gap by giving you the visibility you need to act:
- Catch broken inheritance early: Spot folders where someone has applied unique permissions outside of standard governance, which is one of the most common causes of unintended data exposure.
- Enforce least privilege at the folder level: Find users and groups with Full Control or Edit rights on folders they only need to read and bring those rights back in line with the principle of least privilege.
- Audit external and group-based access: See which folders are reachable through Microsoft 365 groups, security groups, or sharing links and confirm that group memberships actually reflect current responsibilities.
- Stay audit-ready for compliance reviews: Maintain a timestamped, exportable record of folder-level access for evidence during ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and SOX audits.
- Clean up stale or orphaned access: Use creation and modification dates to identify folders whose access has not been reviewed in a long time and revoke rights from former project members or departed users.
What is the Folder Permissions report in SharePoint Manager Plus?
The Folder Permissions report provides detailed information about every folder in your SharePoint environment as well as the users, groups, and permission levels assigned to them. It primarily includes attributes such as the site URL, object name, the user or group with access, location, principal type, group members, permission level, inheritance status, modification date, creation date, and the folder's hierarchy level.
What does the Folder Permissions report show?
Using SharePoint Manager Plus, you can filter the Folder Permissions report with the following fields:
- Microsoft 365 Tenant/Farm: Select the specific tenant or farm where you want to analyze folder permissions across your SharePoint environment.
- Site: Filter the report to a specific SharePoint site so you can drill into folder-level access for a single workspace, team site, or communication site.
The Folder Permissions report displays the following details for every folder:
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Site URL | The web address (URL) of the SharePoint site that contains the folder. |
| Object Name | The name of the folder being audited for permissions. |
| User/Group Name | The name of the user, security group, or SharePoint group that has access to the folder. |
| Location | The path of the folder within the site or document library, showing where the folder sits in the hierarchy. |
| Principal Type | The indication of whether the assignee is a user, SharePoint group, Microsoft 365 group, or Active Directory security group. |
| Group Members | The list of individual users that belong to a group assigned to the folder. |
| Permissions | The permission level granted on the folder, such as Read, Edit, Contribute, or Full Control. |
| Is Inherited | The indication of whether the folder inherits permissions from its parent or has unique permissions that break inheritance. |
| Modified On | The most recent date and time when the folder's permissions were updated. |
| Created Date | The date when the folder was created in SharePoint. |
| Hierarchy Level | The depth of the folder within the site, indicating whether it is a root folder or a nested subfolder. |
Native SharePoint admin center and PowerShell vs. SharePoint Manager Plus
In the SharePoint admin center, folder permissions can only be viewed by opening each library and inspecting permissions on individual folders, one at a time. There is no tenant-wide folder permissions view, no saved filters, and no built-in scheduling. PowerShell can help you pull folder ACLs across sites at scale, but it also leaves you responsible for scheduling jobs, parsing outputs, formatting reports, securing credentials, and maintaining scripts as your environment changes. SharePoint Manager Plus delivers this scripting depth out of the box, with the convenience of a centralized admin console, saved filters, multiple export formats, scheduled email delivery, and direct permission management from the same screen.
Benefits of SharePoint Manager Plus' Folder Permissions report over other SharePoint reports
With SharePoint Manager Plus, your Folder Permissions report combines the depth of PowerShell with the convenience of a centralized admin center.
| Capability | SharePoint admin center | PowerShell | The SharePoint Manager Plus advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Report accessibility | ❌ Manual filtering is required every time |
❌ Script execution is required for every run |
✅ Get one-click access to categorized reports |
| Custom reports | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ Create custom reports by saving granular, attribute-based conditional filters |
| Report exports | ✅ Reports can be exported only in CSV or JSON format |
✅ Requires additional scripting to format and export data |
✅ Reports can be exported in CSV, HTML, PDF, and XLSX formats |
| Emailing reports to admins | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ Send report emails to stakeholders and admins in preferred formats |
| Automated report generation | ❌ This requires technical scripting or separate complex add-ons |
❌ This requires Task Scheduler or Azure Automation |
✅ Schedule multiple reports that can be generated, filtered, emailed, and exported between defined periods automatically |
For a more detailed comparison, check out our page on how to manage SharePoint folder permissions.
Features that enhance the Folder Permissions report
SharePoint Manager Plus provides several built-in tools to help you manage, automate, and secure the data found in the Folder Permissions report:
- Export reports: Download the report in CSV, PDF, HTML, or XLSX formats for sharing with auditors, department heads, or compliance teams.
- Automated report generation: Schedule the Folder Permissions report to run daily, weekly, or monthly so folder-level access reviews happen without manual effort.
- SharePoint alerts for permission changes: Configure real-time alerts to notify admins whenever folder permissions are modified, inheritance is broken, or external access is added to a folder containing sensitive data.
- Folder permission management: Grant, revoke, or copy folder permissions directly from the SharePoint Manager Plus interface, allowing you to act on findings without switching between consoles or writing scripts.
- Bulk permission cleanup: Identify groups of folders with broken inheritance or over-permissioned principals and reset them in bulk to restore standardized access patterns across sites.
Reports that complement the Folder Permissions report
If you are auditing folder-level access and tightening governance across SharePoint, the following reports in SharePoint Manager Plus pair well with the Folder Permissions report:
Site Permissions report: Provides the top-level view of permissions assigned across SharePoint sites. Pair it with the Folder Permissions report to see how site-level access cascades down to libraries and folders and where unique permissions diverge from the parent.
List Permissions report: Surfaces permissions set at the list or library level. This helps you understand the intermediate layer between site permissions and folder permissions, and pinpoint where inheritance is broken.
File Permissions report: Drills one level deeper than folders to show access on individual files. Use it alongside the Folder Permissions report when investigating sensitive documents that may have unique permissions of their own.
SharePoint Groups Permission report: See which SharePoint groups hold permissions on each site and who belongs to those groups. Investigate whether a folder's access stems from group memberships or direct user assignments.
Externally shared file and folder reports: Highlight the specific folders and files that are reachable through sharing links or guest access. This helps you investigate whether a folder's access stems from group memberships rather than direct user assignments.
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 permissions, site usage, 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 to perform specific SharePoint administrative 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 migration progress.
