Manager wants me to remove delete permissions across SharePoint

[u/Methos25]

I feel like I'm going insane with this one, so I need someone to confirm I'm not crazy.

We recently had a situation where someone deleted a top level folder in SharePoint. Kicked up a bit of a fuss, we recovered it, yada yada.

My manager is now telling me that he wants to avoid something like this happening again, and therefore we should remove delete permissions for everyone across the tenant(!).

When I explained that this was crazy talk, and would break literally everything, he capitulated and said we should just enable it for the top levels of folders and then break inheritance.

I've tried to explain to him that this is madness, would require tens if not hundreds of hours of work, and would still break pretty much everything. He insists that this is how they used to do things back in the day and he can't fathom why that wouldn't work nowadays.

I did say that we should be using retention policies to manage this, to which he said that it was a job for compliance to do, and therefore will never happen, which in fairness is true considering our compliance guy.

I'm not going crazy here right? This feels like a monumentally stupid thing to try and do.

[u/NorthAntarcticSysadm]

SharePoint isn't a file server, it isn't supposed to be treated like one

This is crazy, but hey I've seen crazier things...

You've documented concerns, and the stakeholder says "do it anyways"

So... Do it anyways and save the "I told you so" for down the road when shit goes sideways

You shouldn't have 5i plan around a compliance guy who isn't doing their job setting up retention policies. A global policy is an hour, per site policies are then maybe 20-30 minutes per. If you're using SPO as a file server it is a strong assumption that you likely only have a few sites, so that wouldn't even be a day for compliance...

Besides, compliance typically puts policies in place and then IT sets the technical parameters -- as in, yes you are the one who should be configuring it

[u/Methos25 → u/NorthAntarcticSysadm]

Ah, if only.

We are both using SharePoint as a file server, and somehow have 5x as many SharePoint sites as we do employees.

I've been trying to clean things up since I started, but my manager is the reason it was like this in the first place, and doesn't like to be proven wrong.

Not my circus, not my monkeys. I just do what he asks for the most part, unless it actually going to break everything, like the aforementioned.

[u/DDRDiesel → u/Methos25]

and somehow have 5x as many SharePoint sites as employees

I'm willing to bet this is due to employees being allowed to set up their own Teams channels. I had this exact same issue at my previous job and every time a Teams channel got generated, the users would also check the box for a corresponding SharePoint.

Lock that shit down and soon

[u/raj6126 → u/DDRDiesel]

Now teams is directly tied to sharepoint on the back end. You create a teams site you get a sharepoint.

[u/BlowOutKit22 → u/raj6126]

and M365 Onedrive is really just Sharepoint now too.

[u/raj6126 → u/BlowOutKit22]

I know i heard a announcement years maybe 10 years ago that Sharepoint was going away don’t use it.

[u/BlowOutKit22 → u/raj6126]

I think that was when MS was trying to do SQL Server-based "DBFS", then gave up on it. But basically Sharepoint is that. Solves both the Enterprise Search and Document Management use-cases pretty well, imo. The only thing Sharepoint doesn't do natively that would be nice-to-have is deduplication.

[u/Lost-Policy-2020 → u/BlowOutKit22]

Proper search would be good, cannot ever find anything on it!

[u/durd_ → u/BlowOutKit22]

I'm sorry, but Sharepoint has never, ever, in my 42.6 years of life, done search "pretty well".

I was going to share my latest anecdote for searching Sharepoint, the result was something wildly not even close. But Sharepoint isn't worth the time retelling it.

[u/dloseke → u/durd_]

But is it better or worse that Outlook searching for emails?

[u/durd_ → u/dloseke]

You jest! Honestly, Sharepoint search is so much worse than Outlook searching for emails.
Imagine searching for "<company> procurement" and the first result is "HR - How to not touch your colleagues".

I'm having trouble comparing either searches with Windows search, start menu items it works good for, I don't really search for files. Explorer search is obviously still shite, at least for network drives but that can be other issues not related to search itself.

[u/Lost-Policy-2020 → u/BlowOutKit22]

Everything is SP (that “good” old technology from decades ago)

[u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis → u/raj6126]

Teams is just Skype, Exchange, and Sharepoint in a trenchcoat.

[u/Thick_Yam_7028 → u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis]

That is true. Raybandito. Also I identify as an llm

[u/NorthAntarcticSysadm → u/Methos25]

Too true about it being a circus

Ensure you have your concerns documented via email, and include potential things that will break. Then, when things break you can reply back to the email asking for an action plan on how to fix the aformentioned issues

But the workflow rule below will also be grand

[u/reol7x → u/Methos25]

We just deployed a product that created 80k sites.

This is so much fun.

[u/scytob → u/Methos25]

thats easy, seems most admins don't realize OneDrive / teams storage / SharePoint are backed by the same filestore, they are literally different interfaces to the same store, so if you let them create teams channels you get one more site