Office 365 Advent Calendar – 07 External Sharing for SharePoint Online FAQ

SharePoint Online provides you with the option to share content (sites, lists/libraries, documents) with externals – partners, vendors, customers, basically anyone outside your organization. Here are some Frequently Asked Question I’ve seen regularly:

How do I get started with learning more about External Sharing?

To get started, review the following 2 Microsoft support articles:

1. Manage external sharing for your SharePoint Online environment
2. Share sites or documents with people outside your organization

How is an external user actually defined? And what kind of license do they need?

An external user is someone who is not an employee of your company, and who has an account that is not created within your own tenant. Or in other words: an account that is not set up within any of your verified domains (mycompany.com, mycompany.de) and your tenant domain (mytenant.onmicrosoft.com).

I want to enable external sharing for selected site collections only, how can I do that?

First, you need to activate external sharing for the tenant. This does not automatically enable external sharing on all your sites, the default setting is ‘Don’t allow sharing outside your organization’.

Once that’s done, you can then define per site collection whether sharing with externals is enabled, and with which configuration.

If I add an external user to a single site collection, does he have access to other site collections as well?

Please note that users added via the second step are always added to the “Everyone” as well as the “Everyone except Externals” groups. Users invited via the first step are only added to the “Everyone” group. These groups can be used to grant permissions to all users.

I want to enable external sharing on OneDrive for Business sites, how can I do that?

This can be achieved by modifying the sharing settings for your https://mytenant-my.sharepoint.com site collection. ‘Within’ this site collection, you have all your personal OneDrive for Business sites. Once you enable external sharing for it, your employees will be able to share content through here with external parties.

I want to enable external sharing with specified domains only, is this possible?

Yes, this can be done! In the SharePoint Admin portal under ‘Sharing’, you can configure this via the ‘Limit external sharing using domains (applies to all future sharing invitations). Separate multiple domains with spaces.’ setting. You could also do the reverse and define domains for which sharing is blocked.
You can find more information here: Restricted Domains Sharing in Office 365 SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

Can I set an expiry date on a link which I want to send to an external partner?

Yes, this can be done, but only for shared files and folders and only for anonymous links. When you share a file/folder with someone via their account, the sharing invitation and the link won’t expire.

On a tenant level, you can define when these links will expire via the ‘Anonymous access links expire in this many days’ setting. When you create a link to a file, you can then also define again when it will expire.

Can I get a list of all the external users?

Yes, you can use the Get-SPOExternalUser cmdlet for this.

Do you have any additional questions? Post them below as a comment