At Ignite we announced a major improvement to the way secure external sharing of files and folders works in both OneDrive and SharePoint in Office 365 and we wanted to share what this means for users...
Updated Jun 25, 2020
Version 4.0
Blog Post
Hi StephenRice
Thank you for your reply. Hopefully some of my suggestions will implemented.
In regards to the tagging, which I assume you mean search, I did go through ms-support on my tenant (not premium support) to help me work out if there was an issue. I only got the sharing links once to show up in the external sharing stats page. I had to click stop sharing so only the owners had access to the document/folder, then I shared with an external user who was not part of my AD, so that it created a sharing link.
(I believe I did test that the external user had access to the document, but cannot guarantee I did this for every test. However, I would argue this isn't very good, as you could have a document externally shared for months, because the person has never accessed it, and you wouldn't know in the externally shared stats.)
It was only after I reindex the document library, and after about 20mins or so, the item came up saying it was shared. However, if I removed the share, and reindexed the document library, it still showed that it was externally shared, even when I checked it the next day. I have yet to see it properly working since and without a need to reindex the document library, or clear all permissions first.
We do have custom permissions on our sites. There are a couple of additional groups apart from Owners, Members and Visitors. Our library inherit permissions from the site initially. However, surely this shouldn't prevent it from working. I can set up a test now and check tomorrow, on a standard OTB team site.
Thanks
Paul