How to find external users in SharePoint (free report)
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External sharing is the feature everyone wants until someone asks the obvious question: who outside the company can currently see this site? The answer is rarely on one screen. Guests arrive through sharing links, through Microsoft 365 group membership, and through one-off folder shares that broke inheritance eighteen months ago.
SharePoint Smart Permissions is a free, MIT-licensed SPFx web part that produces the whole picture as a read-only report you can export to Excel.
Why the native screens fall short
- Site permissions shows groups, not the people inside them — guests hide one layer down.
- Manage access is per-item, so answering a site-wide question means clicking through hundreds of objects.
- Sharing reports cover link activity, not the resulting effective access.
The report you actually want
Smart Permissions walks the site, its lists and libraries, and every object where inheritance is broken. Each row is labeled either Inherited or Unique — those are the only two categories, and the distinction is what makes the audit actionable. An inherited guest means somebody is in a site-level group; a unique guest means somebody deliberately shared one folder.
Expanded group membership is the whole trick
Most external access is invisible until group membership is expanded. A single Microsoft 365 group on a site can contain a dozen guests from three partner organizations. With expansion enabled, each of those accounts appears as its own row, so filtering for #EXT# in Excel returns a real list of humans rather than a list of group names. There's more detail in expanded group members in SharePoint permissions.
What to do with the findings
- Guests on unique permissions for a closed project — remove the unique permission, restore inheritance.
- Guests in a site-level group who no longer need it — remove from the group.
- Guests you cannot account for — escalate to the site owner before removing anything.
Smart Permissions never makes those changes for you. It reports; you decide and act in SharePoint, then re-run the scan and keep the exported file as evidence.
Related
- How to run a SharePoint permissions audit
- Reviewing a permissions report in Excel
- SharePoint permissions: complete reference
Permissions tools
- SharePoint permissions audit tool — free, read-only, MIT-licensed SPFx web part.
- SharePoint permissions reporting tool — what to look for when choosing one.
Frequently asked questions
How do I recognize an external user in the report?
Guest accounts appear with #EXT# in the login name and typically carry an email domain outside your tenant. Filtering the exported Excel on either pattern isolates them.
Does the report show guests who only have a sharing link?
Sharing links create system groups that grant access to specific objects, so the resulting access shows in the report as a unique permission on that object.
Can it show guests inside Microsoft 365 groups?
Yes. With expanded group membership enabled, Microsoft 365 group membership is resolved to individual accounts, which is where most guest access actually lives.
Can Smart Permissions remove external access?
No. It is strictly read-only reporting. Removal is done in SharePoint or the Microsoft 365 admin center, then re-scan to verify.
Does this need tenant admin rights?
No. Site Owner permission on the site being scanned is sufficient, because the web part runs in SharePoint under your own account.
How often should we run an external access audit?
Quarterly is a reasonable rhythm for most organizations, plus an ad-hoc run whenever a project involving guests closes.
The SharePoint permissions guides
Understand how access is granted, report on who actually has it, then compare the tools that get you there.
Understand
How permission levels, groups, inheritance and sharing links actually fit together.
Where inheritance breaks, why it matters, and how to find every object with unique permissions.
Answer the question a manager asks most, down to a single folder or file.
Report
The free permissions report: every site, library, folder and file, exported to Excel.
What a permissions report should contain and how to run one without PowerShell.
A repeatable audit: scope, run, review, remediate, and re-check.
See the real people behind a group, not just the group name.
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Keep reading
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How to see every SharePoint site you have access to (and build a site directory)
SharePoint has no built-in page that lists every site a person can open. A PnP Modern Search results web part with a contentclass:STS_Site query gives you one — security-trimmed, self-updating, and free.
Want a second set of eyes?
Get a SharePoint permissions audit from our team
We review who can see what across your sites, flag oversharing before you roll out Copilot, and help you put a cleanup plan and governance in place.
About the author
Sean Regan
SharePoint & Microsoft 365 consultant with 20+ years of hands-on experience building SPFx web parts, migration tooling and tenant-grade automation. Maintainer of the open-source SharePoint Smart Solutions suite.