Microsoft details new sharing experience improvements coming to Microsoft 365 apps

Microsoft today announced a bunch of improvements that it will be making to the share dialog experience across its Microsoft 365 suite of apps over the coming year. The firm says that it has been gathering feedback on how users collaborate to improve the experience of managing access permissions and sharing content with other users. It adds that over the next year, it will gradually introduce updates to its services across all platforms and continue gathering feedback to finetune the changes.

First up are ways to quickly grant permissions to users thanks to an “intuitive and discoverable” menu that will allow users to simply choose between granting editing or viewing permissions. A more granular set of options can be accessed via the Link settings option in the dropdown that will allow users to tweak link types and sharing permissions such as limiting sharing to just users in the organization. Quick permissions and Link settings are now available to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint users.

Next up are improvements coming to the Copy link feature that allows users to generate a shareable link for documents. Currently, changing edit permissions after generating a link warrants a recreation of the document link, which will change in the future. The copy link dialog will now house a footer link for permissions which will let users change access and edit permissions. Applying the changes will automatically generate a new link and allow users to easily copy those links for sharing. The feature will roll out to users in November, as per the roadmap listing.

The share dialog will also be adding a ‘Shared with’ list at the bottom to provide a glanceable view of the number of users a document is shared with, which can be clicked on to navigate to the Manage Access settings to further tweak access permissions.

The Manage Access dialog itself is receiving a few updates in the way of bifurcation between People, Groups, and Links to differentiate between which individuals or groups a document has been shared. Users will be able to click on individual names or groups to change permissions or revoke their access completely. The ‘Shared with’ list and Manage Access improvements are expected to make it to OneDrive in November.

Lastly, the Redmond company is bringing some improvements to the Share dropdown across is Microsoft 365 suite of apps such as OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and more. Starting later this year, the dropdown will provide a contextual menu with relevant share targets to share the document, such as via email or through Teams, making it easier to quickly send across files.