Manage external sharing for your SharePoint Online environment

An Update on SharePoint Online features:

If your organization performs work that involves sharing documents or collaborating directly with vendors, clients, or customers, then you might want to use the external sharing features of SharePoint Online to share content with people outside your organization who do not have licenses for your Microsoft Office 365 subscription.

This article describes the external sharing features of SharePoint Online. If you’re looking for other external sharing features in Office 365, see:

- Share calendars with external users

- Use Lync to connect with external contacts

What are the external sharing features of SharePoint Online?

External sharing features include:

- The ability to turn external sharing on or off globally for an entire SharePoint Online environment (or tenant). Turning external sharing off at the tenant level means no documents, sites, or site collections can be shared externally.

- The ability to turn external sharing on or off for individual site collections. This provides you with the ability to secure content on specific site collections that you do not want to be shared.

- The ability to share sites and documents with authenticated users. Authenticated users are those who are invited to sign in by using a Microsoft account or Office 365 user ID.

- The ability to share sites and documents with guest users. Guest users, also called anonymous users, don’t need a Microsoft account or Office 365 user ID to access your sites and documents. They access via guest links that you or your employees give to them.

What is an external user?

An external user is someone outside of your organization who can access your SharePoint Online sites and documents but does not have a license for your SharePoint Online or Microsoft Office 365 subscription. External users are not employees, contractors, or onsite agents for you or your affiliates.

External users inherit the use rights of the SharePoint Online customer who is inviting them to collaborate. That is, if an organization purchases an E3 Enterprise plan, and builds a site that uses enterprise features, the external user is granted rights to use and/or view the enterprise features within the site collection they are invited to. While external users can be invited as extended project members to perform a full range of actions on a site, they will not have the exact same capabilities as a full, paid, licensed member within your organization.

Other features that might not be available to external users are:

- Excel Services features, including Calculated Measures and Calculated Members, decoupled Pivot Tables and PivotCharts, Field List and field support, filter enhancements, search filters.

- SharePoint Online data connection libraries

- Visio Services

Deciding how to share

External sharing is turned on by default for your entire SharePoint Online environment (sometimes referred to as a tenant) and the site collections in it. You may want to turn it off globally before people start using sites or until you know exactly how you want to use the feature.

You have a lot of flexibility when enabling external sharing so you’ll want to spend some time considering your options. For example, you can enable sharing across the tenant, which gives all users the ability to share. You can limit sharing to certain site collections so only those site collection administrators and administrators of sites within those collections can invite external users. You can also limit the ability to share sites and documents to a select group of users.

When considering if and how you want to share content externally, think about the following:

- To whom do you want to grant access to content on your team site and any subsites, and what do you want them to be able to do?

- To whom in your organization do you want to grant permission to share content externally?

- Is there content you want to ensure is never available to be viewed by people external to your organization?

The admin settings for external sharing differ depending on what Office 365 plan your organization subscribes to.

Mohammad Sahebjamee