Forum Discussion
Default Sharepoint Permissions Set to Everyone for Public Communities
In native mode, it appears that when a new community is created as public, the corresponding sharepoint site that is created gives "Everyone except external users" site member access. This means that even users who are restricted from using Viva Engage via the option to block unlicensed users are able to see files and resources that have been uploaded to that community. This is a particular problem in environments where some users need restricted access, such as Students in an education environment.
Is there a way to change this behaviour, or set a default public group? The only solution we can think of is to either set all communities to private (which diminishes the user experience of Viva Engage), or to ensure that Sharepoint permissions are updated manually whenever a new community is created.
Any help greatly appreciated.
Hi J_W
You could try to use Power Automate to automate the alteration of permissions for Community sites. If your workflow trigger starts by looking for SharePoint sites created for an Engage community, you could target those sites. The most likely option to differentiate between sites is the template ID but this concept would need testing. Hope that helps a bit!
-Rob
This is the behavior for any SharePoint site connected to a Microsoft 365 Group that's public, including Teams workspaces that are public. You can't change this default behavior, and so you'd have to go into the permissions for the document library and somehow set up the permissions to omit the blocked users.
