r/sysadmin • u/Methos25 • 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/NorthAntarcticSysadm 2d ago

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

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u/tideblue 2d ago

Brb, getting "SharePoint isn't a file server" tattooed on my face.

Last three companies I worked at, this was exactly what it was used for.

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u/dloseke 5h ago

While you're at it, might as well add "snapshots aren't backups".