A share link is a two-second decision with consequences measured in months. The reason is simple: a link outlives its conversation, its channel and its quarter. This chapter gives you a sixty-second checklist — one that catches the leak-causing choices before the link is born, instead of after the audit.
Four scopes, four audiences
Most platforms issue links in four scopes; know which one you mean before you paste.
- Only named people — the strictest. Right for anything in which harm grows with an extra reader.
- Anyone in your organisation — the everyday default for internal documents. Safe against outsiders, safe against the forwarded link, as long as the material is ordinary.
- Existing guests — broadens a working circle to the partner audience already invited, without letting strangers in.
- Anyone with the link — a public gate. Right for newsletters and sign-up sheets; wrong for anything that names a person, project or revenue figure.
The habit
Expiry dates convert a link from a permanent fixture into a visitor’s pass. Anything shared outside the company gets an expiry — most approvals arrive as the phrase “and it will stop working after the launch”.
View is not a downgrade — it is the default
The other dial is edit versus view. Requesting edit rights by default keeps the door open for collaboration; handing out edit rights by default keeps the document a target. Publish drafts with edit rights on purpose; publish finished materials as view-only, and treat the link bar as the lock, not the handle.
Audiences: links go, announcements don’t. That means giving your links an occasional audit — the platform remembers what you forgot. Sixty seconds, once a month, and the leak you avoided never appears on a slide.
