SharePoint sharing links can now expire automatically

If your team shares files via SharePoint or OneDrive, you’ve probably never given much thought to what happens to those links after the project finishes. By default, they don’t expire. Someone who left the company six months ago, or a link shared for a one-off task, could still be working just fine right now.

Microsoft is closing that gap. From mid-March 2026, rolling through to May for most tenants, you’ll be able to set automatic expiration dates on organisation-wide sharing links — the kind that let anyone with a company email access a file or folder.

Why stale links are a real problem

When a member of staff leaves, or a project wraps up, shared links tend to get forgotten. Nobody revokes them, because nobody remembers they exist. For most businesses, that’s a minor loose end. But if you handle client files, legal documents, or anything a regulator or insurer might scrutinise, it’s the sort of thing that comes up in audits.

Before this feature, cleaning up old links meant doing it by hand. Now it’s automatic.

The new setting gives you two controls:

• Maximum expiration: the hard ceiling, between 7 and 730 days. No link can run longer than this, even if someone tries to set a longer one.
• Recommended expiration: the default that appears when staff create a link, say 30 or 60 days. Staff can adjust it, but only up to your maximum. So if you set a 60-day default and a 180-day ceiling, links expire at 60 days unless someone has a good reason to extend them, and nothing runs beyond six months regardless.

What to do next

The feature is opt-in, so nothing changes on its own. When you’re ready, configuration is done via PowerShell, and the discussion on r/Office365 has a useful rundown of the options. You can apply different rules to SharePoint sites and OneDrive separately, and override the default for specific sensitive projects.

One practical tip before you switch it on: tell your staff. If sharing links start expiring and nobody knew that was coming, you’ll get a wave of confused messages. A short email — “links now expire after 60 days, you’ll get a reminder before they do” — takes two minutes and prevents a headache.

This is a sensible feature that’s been missing for a while. Getting the expiration windows right for your business and communicating the change properly are the two things most likely to trip people up. Dragon Digital handles Microsoft 365 governance and configuration for businesses across North Wales, so if you’d rather not dig through PowerShell yourself, we can set the right defaults and handle the staff communications.