Friday, April 30, 2021

Be aware: ''Check Permissions" does not report M365 Group authorizations until first access

The new and default permission model for Modern Team Sites is via the 'owning' Office 365 Group. I discovered a functional flaw in that: on accounts authorized for site access via the Office 365 group, the SharePoint 'Check Permissions' capability reports "None" until first site visit of an authorized account (which on SharePoint level results that the account is administrated in the (hidden) site users list). I reported this to Microsoft Support, and they reproduced + confirmed the behavior in an arbitrair tenant. Their first response was "this is expected behavior", but I strongly disagree. We use and rely on 'Check Permission' to assess whether a person has access or not to a SharePoint site. And the reliability of this access-check should not be dependent that the assessed person has actually already once visited the site.
Update: in call with Microsoft Support they motivated the "this is expected behavior": it is expected from how it is technically build within SharePoint.... When I re-stated that on functional view this is not expected behavior, they agreed and asked me to submit as UserVoice suggestion; so that the development team can triage it for product fix.