SharePoint Manager Plus provides over 140 SharePoint reports that help administrators monitor and manage SharePoint efficiently. One such report is the Orphaned Users report, which helps identify stale user records linked to deleted, disabled, migrated, or otherwise unresolvable identities.
Why you need an orphaned users report
SharePoint can retain a user entry in a site collection's User Information List after the corresponding directory identity is deleted or becomes unresolvable. Depending on how access was assigned, related permission or group membership records may also remain and require review.
These stale records can complicate offboarding checks, permission reviews, site administration, and audit evidence. Verizon's 2025 DBIR executive summary highlights third-party involvement as a major breach concern, reinforcing the need to remove residual access from former employees, contractors, vendors, and external collaborators. SharePoint does not provide a single native admin center report that consolidates unresolved user entries across all site collections.
An orphaned users report provides this centralized visibility, helping administrators identify stale identity records and investigate them before they affect access governance processes.
- Find accounts left behind after offboarding: Identify former employees, contractors, or vendors whose SharePoint access was never fully removed when their identity was deactivated.
- Clean up residual permissions safely: See exactly which site collections an orphaned account still has access to, so cleanup can be targeted instead of guesswork.
- Catch identity sync failures early: Find SharePoint entries that no longer match the connected directory and determine whether they result from deletion, migration, renaming, or sync issues.
- Reduce stale identity issues: Remove unresolvable user and permission entries that complicate access reviews and site administration.
- Support offboarding and access reviews: Export or schedule the report to document the detection, investigation, and remediation of stale SharePoint user records.
What is the Orphaned Users report in SharePoint Manager Plus?
The Orphaned Users report identifies SharePoint user entries that cannot be matched to a valid identity in the connected directory. It displays details such as the stored login name, username, affected site collection, and site URL, helping administrators investigate and remove stale identity records.
What does the Orphaned Users report show?
Using SharePoint Manager Plus, you can filter the Orphaned Users report with the following fields.
- Farm: Select the specific SharePoint farm or Microsoft 365 tenant whose sites you want to scan for orphaned users.
- Site Collection: Narrow the report to a specific sites to check for accounts that no longer resolve to a valid identity.
The Orphaned Users report displays the following details for every orphaned account.
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Login Name | The claims-based or account identifier stored by SharePoint for the user entry. |
| User Name | The display name stored in SharePoint for the user entry. |
| Site Collection Name | The site collection where the unresolved SharePoint user entry was found. |
| URL | The web address of the site collection where the residual access exists. |
Compliance frameworks that the Orphaned Users report can support
Organizations governed by frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001, NIST's Cybersecurity Framework, SOC 2, and the GDPR may need evidence that stale identities and permission records are reviewed as part of identity life cycle and access governance processes.
The Orphaned Users report supports these reviews by identifying SharePoint user entries that no longer resolve to valid directory identities. It can help teams investigate residual records, document remediation, and demonstrate recurring access-review activity.
Native SharePoint admin portals and PowerShell vs. SharePoint Manager Plus
SharePoint does not provide one native admin center report that lists unresolved user entries across all site collections. Administrators can inspect site-level user records individually or combine SharePoint and Microsoft Entra ID data through PowerShell, Microsoft Graph, APIs, or custom automation.
Checking for orphaned user records natively can require administrators to retrieve SharePoint user information, compare it with directory account status, and investigate affected sites separately.
PowerShell can retrieve SharePoint users and directory account states in bulk, but administrators must build the correlation logic, manage permissions, format the output, and automate recurring scans and delivery. SharePoint Manager Plus consolidates these activities into a report-driven workflow.
| 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 formats. | ✅ 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. |
Features that enhance the Orphaned Users report
SharePoint Manager Plus provides several built-in tools to help you manage, automate, and secure the data found in the Orphaned Users report:
- Automated report generation: Schedule the report to run daily, weekly, or monthly so orphaned accounts are caught shortly after they appear, not months later.
- Export reports: Download the Orphaned Users report in CSV, PDF, HTML, or XLSX formats for offboarding audits or to hand off to the identity team.
- Direct orphaned users cleanup: Remove orphaned users directly from the SharePoint Manager Plus interface, without tracking down each site collection manually.
- SharePoint alerts: Configure alerts to notify administrators about critical SharePoint events, including permission changes, suspicious activity, access anomalies, and policy violations.
- Custom reports: Customize the fields and filters in the Orphaned Users report, then save it as a custom report for easy access whenever needed.
Reports that complement the Orphaned Users report
If you are auditing stale or residual access across SharePoint, SharePoint Manager Plus provides several other reports that complement the data found in the Orphaned Users report:
- SharePoint permissions reports: Details who has access to each site, library, and list, giving context on what an orphaned account was able to reach before its identity was deprovisioned.
- Inactive Files report: Identifies files that have not been modified for a specified period, helping you review stale content linked to inactive or orphaned users and prioritise cleanup.
- Site activity reports: Shows recent activity on a site collection, helping confirm that an orphaned account's access was never exercised after the identity was removed.
- External and sharing reports: Identifies external shares, useful for checking whether orphaned guest or external accounts still hold sharing links.
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.
