Most of the time, when we are talking about security in M365, we talk about how to encrypt files and give permission to those files. But… did you know you can Protect a document in SharePoint and OneDrive from being accidentally altered or overwritten? What I can say that It is a very useful feature when autosave is enabled in Excel or Word files.
But… What key points do you need to know?
- You can only protect individual documents, not a complete document library.
- You can not protect OneNote documents, in desktop nor online nor that half-baked OneNote for Windows 10.
- In the desktop apps you can protect Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents against overwriting.
(You can also use other ways of protection, but that is out-of-scope for now) - In the online apps you can only protect Word and Excel, but not PowerPoint.
- You can protect Word and Excel files in SharePoint and OneDrive.
- You can only send with “review-only” in Word, not in Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote (I hope that in the future this will change).
- You can only send with “review-only” when you share with “people you specify” or “people in your tenant with the link”.
- You can use “review-only” in Word in SharePoint and OneDrive.
- When you share the document from SharePoint with an external person who has no access to the site, they receive a code via mail as soon as they try to open the document.
- How does a Word-document open, and which options do you have when you share the document with or without protection, with our without “review-only” and with people with various roles in your SharePoint site? See the table below. The first word is the option that the document opens with.
Albandrod's Memory 