Working with External Users Part 1: SharePoint
The external sharing features of SharePoint lets your users share content and collaborate with people outside of your organisation, which is extremely useful when working with clients, vendors or partners. You can share entire sites, document folders or individual files.
Before you can start sharing though, you’ll need to set up your sharing settings properly. SharePoint allows you to control these at both the organisation level and the site level. To allow external sharing on any site however, you must allow it at the organisation level first. You can then restrict external sharing for other sites.
If a site's external sharing option and the organisation-level sharing option don't match, the most restrictive value will always be applied.
To set the organisation-level sharing settings, go to the SharePoint Admin Center and then click on Sharing.
By default, the sharing level is set to “Anyone” for both SharePoint and OneDrive.
You can change that to one of four options:
Anyone - Anyone that has the link can access the file or folder.
New and existing guests - External guests who have received an invitation will need to sign in with their Office 365 account or provide a code to verify their identity.
Existing guests – You will only be able to share with guests who are already in your directory.
Only people in your organization - This disables external sharing.
Once you have set your organisational sharing level, you can navigate to the location of the relevant folder or file you want to share.
Right click on the folder or file and then click “Share”.
Next, select the link settings to see the four options available to you:
Anyone with the link.
People in your organization with the link.
People with existing access.
Specific people.
You can also set whether or not you want to allow the recipient to be able to edit the files.
You can then either copy the link or send it via email directly within the sharing pop up window.
The third party will receive an invitation to the document or folder and will either be prompted to log in or will be able to view straight away if you set the link settings to “Anyone with the link”.
To share a site, navigate to the site you want to share and click “Share” in the top right. Enter the names of the users you want to share it with, set the permission level and then click Share. The user will receive an email invitation to the site you have shared.
