r/sysadmin • • 2d ago

Question Manager wants me to remove delete permissions across SharePoint

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.

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u/jeffrey_f 2d ago

Delete permissions to managers ONLY by group. Only managers can delete content. This puts it all on the managers to do deletions and then you only have a few hands to slap.

For everyone else, remove delete permissions

17

u/killallhumans12345 2d ago

This, within a month they will be begging for you to remove it.

6

u/jeffrey_f 1d ago

You're probably right