Copilot readiness reviews keep finding hundreds of overshared SharePoint sites
Reviewed by Helen Jones
A Microsoft consultancy summarised permission remediation work across more than 700 Microsoft 365 tenants preparing for Copilot. It reported typical ranges of 150 to 300 overshared SharePoint sites per large tenant, with 40 to 60 percent of sites showing at least one oversharing pattern and 15 to 25 percent of document libraries using broken permission inheritance. The same write-up says “Everyone except external users” style sharing showed up in about 80 percent of the enterprise tenants reviewed. Copilot can surface any content the signed-in user can already reach through Microsoft Graph, including material opened by broken inheritance, broad group grants, anonymous links, and legacy access paths. Microsoft’s own Copilot readiness guidance points admins to SharePoint Advanced Management tools such as content management assessment and data access governance reports to find oversharing. The figures come from one firm’s client base, not a random public sample, so treat them as a strong practitioner signal rather than a universal benchmark.
Before Copilot, oversharing often stayed quiet. Users only hit the wrong file when someone sent a link or raised a ticket. Broken inheritance, broad “everyone” grants, and old guest links lived in the background while search and navigation stayed noisy but limited. After Copilot enters the picture, the same access model becomes an answer engine. Content that was technically reachable but practically buried can appear in chat and agents. For small admin teams, that shifts the problem from abstract governance to a concrete support and audit risk: the mess does not need to grow for the pain to grow. Leadership pressure for Copilot readiness now collides with years of site sprawl you never had headcount to review site by site.
Analysis
Treat this as a targeted cleanup trigger, not a full-tenant rewrite. Pull SharePoint Advanced Management data access governance or oversharing reports if you have them, or sample your highest-traffic hubs and communication sites for Everyone-except-external-users grants, anonymous links, and libraries with broken inheritance, then fix that one pattern first and block new defaults that recreate it.
Source note
Pulse published by Collab365 Spaces, reviewed by Helen Jones on . Cite as "Copilot readiness reviews keep finding hundreds of overshared SharePoint sites", Collab365 Spaces. 2 sources referenced.