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HomeProtectProtect Your Tenant! How to Monitor Office 365 External User Activity (Part 1)

Protect Your Tenant! How to Monitor Office 365 External User Activity (Part 1)

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For Part 2 of this post, click here.


Due to unique business needs, enabling an external user in your company’s Office 365 tenant is now an option. People from outside of the tenant domain can now be invited in or shared access to documents, libraries or sites. The issue arises, though, when those outside users leave traces in the Office 365 tenant in the form of created and modified documents. It might cause potential risks like:

  • Disclosing trade secrets
  • Accidental deletion of core documents/contracts
  • Illegal or non-conforming changes/actions
  • Unreasonable assignment of permissions

You may also notice that some external users have remained dormant for an extensive time with no activity in the tenant. Hence it is time to evaluate the ability to monitor and identify the activity of external users. This is where AvePoint’s SharePoint Report Center comes into play.

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How to Identify External User Activity in Office 365

AvePoint’s Cloud Management Report Center provides a report that can show organizations the activity of external users on either SharePoint Online. Additionally, you can target a specific external user to view his/her activity. In AvePoint’s Cloud Management Report Center Module, go to Compliance Reports/Auditor Reports and then find the User Lifecycle Report to get the activity of external users!

The detailed steps are as follows:

1. Open DocAve 6, go to Report Center -> Compliance Report

External Activity

The page is as follows:

External User Activity

2. Click Auditor Reports, and select User Lifecycle:

External User Activity

3. Input the name of the Report Profile:

External User Activity

4. Configure the search scope and select the node you wish to search:

External User Activity

5. Configure URL Filter, Action Filter and User Filter:

  • URL Filter:

External User Activity

  • Action Filter (Choose the action you would like to monitor):

External User Activity

  • Choose Include all external users in User Filter;

External User Activity

  • Type Filter: Define the level of the search scope.

External Activity 9

  • Click Save Profile and Run Report to generate the report. Click Job Monitor to check the current status.

External Activity 10

Let’s Recap!

As an organization, you may need to grant external users access to your Office 365 tenant. On the other hand, you may gradually start to notice if some external users have remained dormant with no activity in the tenant. That’s why the ability to monitor and identify the activity of external users is so essential, and why we’re proud to offer AvePoint’s DocAve SharePoint Report Center to provide reports for both SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Prem environments!


Want to learn more about monitoring and securing your Office 365 tenant? Read Part 2 here.

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