External Files Shared to Students

MattDPenn — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 20:04:42 GMT

So I've just discovered that while we have emails from external sources, outside of a small whitelist, going to our students blocked evidently shared files will potentially breeze right past that. One, the share email will go right through because the initial share email itself is coming from Google not the external email address. Two, it looks like the "easy" way (Sharing Options under Drive and Docs) of blocking that also force turns off sharing documents to the outside, which is probably desirable anyway.

My question is would this potentially impact things like filtering programs (Bark, GoGuardian, ect) or other oauth logins that request access to the drive (that should be managed by App Access Control anyway)? I'm mostly looking at any fringe cases that could impact legitimate student usage like submitting documents for a K12 contest, though I'd think that would be via the teacher not themselves. I'm also curious whether ya'll are blocking it for all your students or only those under a certain grade since I can see juniors and seniors needing to be able to have external file access for college applications and whatnot.

I'm also assuming this doesn't prevent students from viewing publicly viewable external documents and only, presumably, prevents the student from being specifically added to that documents privilege's.

Re: External Files Shared to Students

panderson — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 20:29:44 GMT

We block external sharing of Drive documents in most cases.

Re: External Files Shared to Students

Josh — Sun, 04 May 2025 23:21:39 GMT

That shouldn't affect any third-party apps that use OAuth. The OAuth login allows the app to access files in Drive (When granted) via the API, on behalf of the logged in user. This is completely separate functionality to file sharing.

The sharing settings are quite configurable and I believe you should be able to configure for most scenarios. Using either the 'Drive and Docs > Sharing Settings' or 'Trust Rules'.

topic Re: External Files Shared to Students in Peer-Peer Topics

External Files Shared to Students

Re: External Files Shared to Students

Re: External Files Shared to Students