Shared items report for SharePoint Online

ManageEngine SharePoint Manager Plus offers a wide range of SharePoint Online reports as part of its SharePoint reporting capabilities. These reports help you monitor and manage SharePoint Online without the operational limitations posed by native reporting workflows in the SharePoint admin center. One such report in SharePoint Manager Plus is the Item-Wise Sharing Access report.

Why you need a report to monitor shared items

Every time a file or folder is shared in SharePoint Online, a new access pathway opens up. Without a systematic way to track those pathways, sensitive data can quietly drift outside your organizational boundaries through oversharing, forgotten guest invitations, or anonymous links that were never revoked.

Microsoft’s 2024 Digital Defense Report noted that Microsoft Entra data showed 600 million identity attacks per day, underscoring the need to monitor external access, guest users, and shared-content exposure in Microsoft 365 environments.

While Microsoft provides per-site sharing reports and data access governance reports in the SharePoint admin center, these views remain fragmented by site, report type, or summary scope. They do not offer a single tenant-wide, item-level view of every shared file or folder with the users, guests, and link types behind each share. In large environments, admins often still need to review multiple reports or dashboards to build a complete picture.

An externally shared items report gives you that unified visibility, so you can act before a compliance incident rather than after.

• Audit sharing activity by user: Review which internal users are initiating the most external shares, and flag patterns that fall outside acceptable usage policies.
• Classify shared content by access type: Determine whether shared items have been granted view-only or edit access, and identify instances where access levels exceed what the task requires.
• Track sharing trends over time: Monitor spikes in sharing activity tied to specific periods or projects to catch automation errors, misconfigured workflows, or coordinated data exfiltration attempts early.
• Map external exposure by location: Understand which site collections or document libraries carry the highest concentration of externally shared content, and prioritize governance remediation efforts accordingly.

What is the Item-Wise Sharing Access report in SharePoint Manager Plus?

The Item-Wise Sharing Access report provides detailed information about every file and folder that has been shared across your SharePoint Online tenant. It includes sharing attributes such as the item name, object type, location within the site, who shared it, who it was shared with, when the sharing action occurred, and the type of access that was granted, giving you a granular view of external sharing activity in one place.

Compliance frameworks supported by the Item-Wise Sharing Access report

Many organizations need to align with one or more major compliance frameworks like ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST SP 800-171, and the GDPR. These frameworks call for organizations to review, restrict, and document access to sensitive content.

The Item-Wise Sharing Access report supports these efforts by giving administrators a consolidated view of files and folders that have been shared across SharePoint Online, along with details such as who shared the item, who it was shared with, when it was shared, and the level of access granted. This visibility helps teams review external sharing regularly, identify excessive or outdated access, and verify that shared content aligns with internal policies and least-privilege practices.

What does the Item-Wise Sharing Access report show?

Using SharePoint Manager Plus, you can filter the Item-Wise Sharing Access report with the following fields:

• Farm: Select the Microsoft 365 tenant environment from which you want to pull sharing access data.
• Site: Narrow the report to a specific site collection to focus your sharing audit on a particular team, department, or project site.

The Item-Wise Sharing Access report displays the following details for every shared item.

Native SharePoint reporting and PowerShell versus SharePoint Manager Plus

In Microsoft 365, sharing data is available through per-site file and folder sharing reports and data access governance reports in the SharePoint admin center. These options are useful, but they remain split by site, activity type, or summary view rather than offering one tenant-wide item inventory.

PowerShell can help query sharing data through SharePoint Online and Microsoft Graph APIs, but it adds scripting, scheduling, formatting, and authentication overhead. SharePoint Manager Plus brings these reporting needs into one console, helping admins move from discovery to action faster.

Benefits of using SharePoint Manager Plus' Item-Wise Sharing Access report over SharePoint reports

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

Capability	SharePoint admin center limitations	PowerShell limitations	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	It requires additional scripting to format and export data	Export reports in CSV, HTML, PDF, and XLSX formats
Emailing reports to admins			Send report emails to stakeholders and admins in favorable formats
Automated report generation	It requires technical scripting or separate complex add-ons	It requires Task Scheduler or Azure Automation	Schedule multiple reports to be generated, filtered, emailed, and exported between defined periods automatically

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

Features that enhance the Item-Wise Sharing Access report

SharePoint Manager Plus provides several built-in tools to help you automate reviews, share findings, and addressing risks identified in the Item-Wise Sharing Access report.

• Export reports: Download the Item-Wise Sharing Access report in CSV, PDF, HTML, or XLSX formats for distribution to security teams, department leads, or external auditors, and for maintaining offline compliance records.
• Automated report generation: Schedule the Item-Wise Sharing Access report to run at set intervals such as daily, weekly, or monthly, so sharing across your tenant is continuously monitored without manual effort.
• Real-time alerts for bulk sharing: Configure threshold-based alerts to notify administrators when an unusual volume of items is shared within a short period, enabling rapid response to potential data exfiltration or misconfigured workflows.
• Modify SharePoint file permissions: Take immediate corrective action from the SharePoint Manager Plus interface by updating permissions on overshared libraries and files or on content shared with unauthorized external users.
• Custom reports: Save filtered views based on access type, the shared file, or the user the file was shared with, so you can quickly focus on the metrics that matter for each governance scenario.

Reports that complement the Item-Wise Sharing Access report

If you are auditing external access and sharing governance in SharePoint Online, SharePoint Manager Plus provides several other reports that build on the visibility offered by the Item-Wise Sharing Access report.

• External and Sharing Access report : View every file, folder, and site shared with external users or through sharing links across your tenant, including the guest identity, link type, and sharing method behind each share.
• SharePoint permissions reports: Get detailed insights into permission assignments at the site, library, and item levels, including unique and inherited permissions. These reports help you understand the access structure that underlies the sharing activity captured in the Item-Wise Sharing Access report.
• Anonymous and guest link reports: Identify sharing links that allow access without authentication—including anonymous links and externally shared links—so you can track down links that expose sensitive content to anyone with the URL.
• SharePoint site activity reports: Monitor how shared content is being accessed and used after sharing occurs. Use these reports to detect unusual access patterns on items that the Item-Wise Sharing Access report has flagged as externally shared.

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.