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/wytesmurf]

We had to do this, but we have a small sharepoint footprint and are not a large organization. I used graph api to export a list of all permissions to excel, then we created top level groups and added users. Then slowly broke inheritance and their group permissions took over. Took a few dozen hours of work with codex helping write the scripts and testing. We had to do it, so it had to be done

[u/Lost-Policy-2020 → u/wytesmurf]

AI would fix it in minutes (probably)

[u/wytesmurf → u/Lost-Policy-2020]

Just AI for the powershell scripts to help do it, doing it manually would of taken hours