One scenario we are hearing more about from our customers is how they can collaborate with external partners, vendors, customers, etc. Luckily Microsoft does provide for this scenario! In this blog post we’ll help you understand how external users in SharePoint works, if there are licensing implications and how to set it up.

External Sharing Overview

In most organizations, having the ability to collaborate externally with users is an important aspect in how to modernize their business processes. Traditionally, users would email documents such as spreadsheets, presentations, Word documents, etc. to their external collaborator. Using email has many disadvantages such as lack of version control, lack of security and in some file size limitations.

With SharePoint Online, your organization can enable the ability to externally share access to SharePoint sites, lists, document libraries and individual documents or items.

There are two levels of External Sharing settings within SharePoint Online: Organization-wide (impacts SharePoint Online across your Office 365 Tenant) and per Site Collection.

For each, there are four basic sharing options (listed from most to least restrictive):

  • No external sharing – External sharing is disabled and you can only collaborate with internal users in your organization
  • Sharing only with external users in your directory – This option allows sharing only with external users who are already in your Azure Active Directory (AD). Typically this means they’ve either already have accepted a sharing invitation or an Azure AD admin added them.
  • Sharing with authenticated external users – An “authenticated external user” means that the user has a Microsoft account or a work/school account from Office 365 or Azure AD at another organization. If you share a site with an authenticated user, they will need to use their account. If you share files, they will be sent a code to verify their identity.
  • Sharing with anonymous users – you can share files and folders with anonymous users by sending them a link. You cannot share sites with anonymous users.

 

Licensing Implications

The official licensing definition of an External User is a user that is not an employee or an onsite contractor of your organization. Employees and onsite contractors would need a license/subscription in order to access SharePoint Online.

That said, External Users will have the ability to perform most collaboration tasks:

  • They can edit, view, delete libraries, lists, documents and items, depending on the permissions level you assign them. For example if you add them to the Member group, they can view, edit and delete content. If you add them to Visitors, then can only view content.
  • External Users can use Office Online to view and edit documents. External Users cannot use the desktop version of Office Professional (if you want them to use that, you need to give them a license).
  • Depending on where you added them, they will be able to see content in sites that inherit the permissions on the site which they were added.

 

Handling Confidential Data

If you have a data that is considered confidential and you do not want anyone from outside your organization to have access to it, disable External Sharing at the Site Collection level to prevent users from sharing content with External Users.

 

Enable External Sharing

To enable External Sharing, you will need to configure the settings in two places:

  • Globally in the SharePoint Admin Center
  • Individual Site Collections

 

Turn External Sharing On Globally

  1. Login to Office 365 as a global admin or SharePoint admin
  2. Click on the App Launcher icon The app launcher icon in Office 365 and click on Admin
  3. On the quick launch menu, select Admin Centers > SharePoint
  4. On the quick launch menu, select Sharing
  5. Select the Sharing option needed (as described above):
  7. There are additional settings to fine tune External Sharing. Read Microsoft’s documentation for more detail: Turn external sharing on or off for SharePoint Online
  8. When done, click on OK to save the External Sharing settings.

 

Turn External Sharing On Per Site Collection

Note: Microsoft is currently rolling out a new and improved SharePoint Admin Center – the steps below may change in the near future.

  1. Login to Office 365 as a global admin or SharePoint admin
  2. Click on the App Launcher icon The app launcher icon in Office 365 and click on Admin
  3. On the quick launch menu, select Admin Centers > SharePoint
  4. In the upper right portion of the screen, click on Try the preview to open the new SharePoint Admin Center
  5. Click on Active Sites
  6. Select the site name where you want to enable External Sharing
  7. A menu will appear on the right-hand side of the screen.
  8. Find the External Sharing setting and click on Change
  9. The following options will appear:
  11. Select the option appropriate for your external sharing needs and click on Save

 

In our next blog post we’ll discuss how your External Users will experience SharePoint Online.