How many times do we need to use the word “groups”…. 😀

Did you know that if you try add the “everyone except external users” group to the Members or Visitors groups of Office 365 SharePoint Groups SharePoint site, that overnight, they will be stripped out? This is a “by design” “feature”, (and their workaround is ridiculous).

We tested this last night on 4 different tenants after one of our local industry colleagues asked if we were experiencing what they were. As true as nuts, we did. It also is only happening on new site collections being created, not sure when Microsoft implemented this, but on a site we had created in February, the permissions remained untouched. All the new ones we created yesterday stripped out the ‘everyone’ group overnight.

Now Microsoft is claiming that this is by design. I’m not okay with that on any level. If you agree, please vote this up on uservoice. Microsoft has no mandate to decide what permission levels we allocate to what staff in our companies, nor should they be allowed to keep making these decisions without our consent. Other people agree too. This is a boundaries issue – Microsoft is wielding far too much power on our internal business systems and taking over with what they feel is the right governance. Only we have the rights to decide that for our businesses.

It is my opinion, that the permissions model in SharePoint has been severely compromised with the onset of Office 365 Groups. The Office 365 permissions model has become a massive monster that has gotten away from everybody and it conflicts directly with the SharePoint permissions model. People are simply not understanding the impact of using Office 365 Groups. No amount of uservoice votes, or calls logged, or emails to Microsoft seem to helping in this space. The objective of resolving the “rogue IT problem” with groups has not been thought out enough and is jeopardizing an established, very widely adopted SharePoint platform globally.

If want to take back control of your permissions, the only way to do it is to go back to normal SharePoint site collections, because Microsoft is controlling Office 365 Groups, not you.