As you're probably aware, SharePoint is one of the best tools on the market for document storage and management. Sharing documents in SharePoint Online is incredibly easy. Sharing documents with third parties is a little bit more complicated. How can you manage external sharing in SharePoint Online safely? To answer that, we wrote this basic guide that should walk you through what to do. Let's take a look at managing external sharing in SharePoint Online.
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External sharing is the process of sharing content from within your SharePoint with someone outside of your organization. Additionally, if your company uses multiple SharePoint subscriptions, external sharing can be used to share content between these two licenses. You need to be careful about how you handle external sharing in your company. While Microsoft does a good job at keeping malicious third parties from accessing your files, it can't do anything for you if you hand them the key.
Before you can begin sharing documents, you need to make sure your sharing settings are set up properly. SharePoint allows you to control these at an organizational level and at a site level. In order for users to be able to share content at a site level, external sharing has to be enabled at an organizational level.
Once you're here, you can make other changes to how external sharing happens at an organization level. If you are interested in learning more about external sharing settings, you can check out this Microsoft blog.
The steps you need to follow to Share a site on SharePoint Online will change depending on the type of site you're trying to share.
This is the same process as adding an authenticated external user. The third party will receive an invite via email. The main difference is that once the invitation is accepted, the user will receive group emails, calendar invites, and Yammer discussions as well. They'll gain access to the group's associated team site and content.
If you want to limit external sharing at your organization, turning off external sharing might seem attractive. Don't do that. Instead, configure your sharing settings to match how much you will be sharing. By turning off external sharing, you risk limiting yourself and having to spend time going back in to turn it back on in a case where you have to share something with a third party.
To make sure that people aren't sharing the wrong things with the wrong people, your organization needs to implement proper governance. All of your users should be on the same page about your sharing policies. In addition, by having governance policies your organization has policies in place if there is a sharing blunder.
We know that we just told you not to turn off external sharing, but hear us out. Turning off anonymous sharing is different then turning off external sharing altogether. Turning of anonymous sharing will offer you more control over who can access what documents within your SharePoint.
External sharing in SharePoint Online isn't difficult. Just use the tips and tricks above and you'll have complete control over external document sharing at your organization.
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