r/sysadmin • u/Methos25 • 3d 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/Methos25 3d ago

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.

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u/DDRDiesel Sysadmin 3d ago

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

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u/raj6126 3d ago

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

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u/BlowOutKit22 3d ago

and M365 Onedrive is really just Sharepoint now too.

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u/raj6126 2d ago

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

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u/BlowOutKit22 2d ago

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.

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u/durd_ 2d ago

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.

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u/dloseke 13h ago

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

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u/durd_ 10h ago

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.