Use the Office 365 Audit Log to Find Who Updated a Document

Interrogating SharePoint and OneDrive Document Version History

A recent question asked how to use the SharePoint Online PnP PowerShell module to extract the version history of a document. The PnP (Patterns and Practices) module contains cmdlets to handle complex SharePoint provisioning and management scenarios. If you get to know PnP, you probably like it because it can handle actions from update a SharePoint document to create a new folder. However, the nature of PnP is that its interaction with objects is more complicated than other PowerShell modules.

The usual reason why people want to look at the version history for a document is to know who made a change to its content. Given how autosave captures document updates, the number of versions available for a document stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business can be large (Figure 1).

Office 365 Audit Log is an Alternative

If you’re not used to PnP, you might find it easier to extract information about events to update a SharePoint document from the Office 365 audit log. Every time a document is uploaded or updated in a SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business document library, SharePoint creates an audit event that is later ingested into the Office 365 audit log (the event should be available about 15 minutes after the update). If we know the name of a document, it’s easy to search the audit log with the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet and find its audit records.

Searching for Document Change Audit Events

The PowerShell script below uses the $FileName variable to hold the name of the document to search for. If events occurred for this document over the last 90 days, the search should find events to record the initial upload of the document to the library (FileUploaded) and subsequent updates (FileModified) and views (FileAccessed). If the AutoSave feature is enabled for the document, multiple update records can accumulate over a short period. As is normal with audit records, a lot of interesting information is found in the AuditData property.

$FileName = (Read-Host "Enter file name to search")
$Records = (Search-UnifiedAuditLog -StartDate (Get-Date).AddDays(-90) -EndDate (Get-Date).AddDays(+1)  -Operations FileModified, FileAccessed, FileUploaded -ObjectIds $FileName -ResultSize 1000)
If ($Records.Count -eq 0) {
   Write-Host "No audit records found for file names beginning with" $FileName }
 Else {
   Write-Host "Processing" $Records.Count "audit records..."
   $Report = [System.Collections.Generic.List[Object]]::new()
   ForEach ($Rec in $Records) {
      $AuditData = ConvertFrom-Json $Rec.Auditdata
      $ReportLine = [PSCustomObject]@{
           TimeStamp   = $Rec.CreationDate
           User        = $AuditData.UserId
           Action      = $AuditData.Operation
           SiteUrl     = $AuditData.SiteUrl
           Site        = $AuditData.SourceRelativeUrl
           File        = $AuditData.SourceFileName
           IpAddress   = $AuditData.ClientIP
           App         = $AuditData.UserAgent  }
      $Report.Add($ReportLine) }}

Listing the Results

After analyzing the audit records, we can list the set of actions found for the document:

$Report | Select Timestamp, User, Action

TimeStamp            User                               Action
---------            ----                               ------
22 Apr 2020 14:40:41 Jane.Maloney@office365itpros.com   FileModified
21 Apr 2020 15:19:03 Jane.Maloney@office365itpros.com   FileModified
21 Apr 2020 15:02:34 Kim.Akers@office365itpros.com      FileModified
21 Apr 2020 15:01:39 Jane.Maloney@office365itpros.com   FileUploaded

To distribute the report, you could simply print it or create a CSV file. Other distribution methods include:

• Format the content in HTML and send it via email (see this article for details).
• Create the report in a SharePoint document library (the basics of how to do this is explained here; the scenario is a script running in a Azure Automation runbook but the technique of using PnP cmdlets is the same in “regular” PowerShell).
• Post the report to a Teams channel or post a link to it in a message card created in a Teams channel using the inbound webhook connector. See this article for more information.

Is Ninety Days Enough?

If your accounts have Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 compliance licenses, audit records are available for 365 days. However, 90 days is usually enough to find out who made a change to an important document. Unless the change was overlooked and has only just been noticed!

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