Microsoft Copilot
What is permission tracking in Microsoft 365?
Permission tracking in Microsoft 365 means being able to answer who can reach what, through which route and why. It needs one inventory of users and their relations to workspaces, regular owner reviews of that access and a record of what was removed.
In short
- Access comes through many routes: group membership, site permissions, sharing links, guests and Teams.
- Each service shows its own permissions, so no admin center shows a person total reach.
- Resource owners can confirm whether access is still needed; central IT usually cannot.
- Keep a record of what was reviewed and removed, because it is the evidence for compliance and security.
Step by step
Five steps give you one view of permissions that stays current and is reviewed by the people who know.
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Decide which access routes count
List the ways access is granted in your tenant: group and team membership, site permissions, sharing links, guest accounts and shared mailboxes. Start with the routes that reach sensitive content or external people.
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Build one inventory of users and their relations
Collect users, groups, teams, sites and guests into one inventory that records each relation, such as group memberships, team ownerships and shared sites. This lets you follow a person to everything they can reach.
Tip: Include Entra ID, because it is the source of group membership and guest identity.
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Find the exceptions
Run checks for the patterns that signal risk, such as files shared with external users, guests who have not signed in, accounts of people who left and workspaces with no owner.
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Send access to owners for review
Ask each workspace owner to confirm who still needs access, on a cycle that matches risk. Unconfirmed access is removed, and guests are removed by default when nobody answers.
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Keep the record of every change
Store who reviewed what, when and what was removed. That record is what a compliance or security review asks for, and it turns permission tracking from a one-off cleanup into a routine.
In Rencore:
What causes the transparency problems
A person can reach a document as a group member, through a site permission, from a sharing link or as a Teams guest. Each route is managed in a different place, with its own model and its own admin center, so the full picture of who can reach what exists nowhere. The more services you use together, the wider the gap between what admins can see and what is actually granted.
The result is a transparency problem for compliance and security. When an auditor or an incident asks who had access, the answer is assembled by hand from several exports, and it is out of date by the time it is finished. Access that nobody reviews also grows quietly as people change teams and projects end.
Connectors in this How-to
Each connector page in the Rencore docs lists the objects, policies, reports and actions behind these steps.
Last updated 11 November 2026
