Office 365 SharePoint Online: Student Accounts-Stop access to staff SharePoint site contents

Office 365 with OneDrive are a great combination of tools to use for Collaboration. Especially in educational environments. Teachers and Students can collaborate on courseworks, homeworks, projects and students with their OneDrive can collaborate among their classmates on projects.

Schools and colleges can use SharePoint Online’s Team site to create a space for Schools, Departments or any other divisions that best applies to their environment and manage their documents online collaborating with the various apps available out of the box as well as custom apps that address their specific business requirements.

Now when you choose your students to be licensed for Office 365  and decide to give them SharePoint,Office Online and 365 Pro Plus

You can be guaranteed that your students get the tools that you want them to have. As seen in the picture below

Excited students, clicking on Sites and “Search Everything” say something like
“Test” and happen to bump into the test papers that Teachers shared in SharePoint sites or in their “Shared With Everyone” folders, that won’t be  good..:)

How  to stop the documents appearing in search results from SharePoint Sites when students search it?

There are only two ways to solve the problem from what I found.

1. Get Standalone OneDrive for Business license to students accounts. http://windowsitpro.com/office-365/onedrive-business-detached-office-365-and-sharepoint-online

(or)

1. Create two AD groups
2. All Staff/ All SharePoint Users – whatever naming convention feels appropriate and
3. All Students

Remove ‘All authenticated users’ from SharePoint team site members/visitors group or any other groups that this is added to.

Once the two disparate AD accounts are created, add ‘All Staff/All SharePoint Users’ AD group to site group that they need access to.

This will not only ensure SharePoint Libraries OneDrive for Business Sync for All Staff, but also stop Student accounts from accessing SharePoint sites/ its shared contents.

This is how you stop students from accessing contents of SharePoint sites they aren’t supposed to access.

Trust this helps someone trying to accomplish the same!

Have fun SharePointing!

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