Forum Discussion
Will anonymous external sharing be disabled: New ways to govern access of external users
IMHO, you are not correct.
What will change is that external users will see only the content that has been shared directly with them or with Groups to which the external users belong.
This applies only to external users which are required to sign-in, while anonymous sharing will continue to work as usual.
Is this a Beta product, or are people just supposed to know that they should not be using Groups?
Hi Harold Anderson.
It is actually very simple to share Group items to anonymous users.
The main steps are the following:
- Enable anonymous sharing at tenant level.
- Enable anonymous sharing at Group site collection level
- Share the item
The first two steps are clearly described in the following article:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/turn-external-sharing-on-or-off-for-sharepoint-online-6288296a-b6b7-4ea4-b4ed-c297bf833e30#ID0EAABAAA=Office_365_Groups
Also, we have discussed this topic in detail in many threads in this community.
Hope it helps...
- The final command should be
Get-SPOSite -Identity https://netorgftxxxxxxx.sharepoint.com/sites/marketing -Detailed
Replace xxxxxxx with your tenant id, and replace marketing with your site name. Those who looks for the steps to enable this feature manually, this Blog article may be helpful.
- StephenRice
Microsoft
Hi Harold,
That's great! Glad to hear it worked okay!
And I just double checked the documentation, the final command is actually -Detailed (which returns SharingCapability) instead of what I had above. Either way, if you can get an anonymous link, then everything worked right!
If you have any other questions, let me know!Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
- That worked except for the last command. But I verified that the other commands worked by creating an anonymous link.
Get-SPOSite -Identity https://netorgftxxxx.sharepoint.com/sites/Sales18 -SharingCapability
Get-SPOSite : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'SharingCapability'.
At line:1 char:76
+ ... tps://netorgftxxxx.sharepoint.com/sites/Sales18 -SharingCapability
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [Get-SPOSite], ParameterBindingException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NamedParameterNotFound,Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell.GetSite - StephenRice
Hi Harold,
Totally understand. If you want to keep using OneDrive for your company, that's certainly an option. In case it is of value, here is what you will need to do for PowerShell
Connect-SPOService -Url https://<mycompany>-admin.sharepoint.com
(this will pop a prompt for your admin credentials)
Set-SPOSite -Identity https://<mycompany>.sharepoint.com/sites/<restofsiteurl> -SharingCapability ExternalUserAndGuestSharing
(this will allow anonymous links on that site)
You can then use "Get-SPOSite -Identity https://<mycompany>.sharepoint.com/sites/<restofsiteurl> -SharingCapability to confirm the value was set.
Hope that helps!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
- Thanks for the response. The reason we put the files in a Group site was because they were thought of as owned by the whole company rather than one person: So "we" instead of "me" as you say. The problem came when we wanted to share the files with an external web developer. We found out that the share with Anyone link was mysteriously greyed out, and when we Googled the solution, were led to this thread.
I downloaded the PowerShell in an attempt to get it working, but did not see any documentation on it beyond what I could get at the command line. I think the farthest I got was
get-help Set-SPOSite -detailed.
But then there were a lot of options without any description (such as Identity) without any description of how to figure out what they were.
So, my conclusion is that this must only be meant for internal Microsoft developers, since there is no documentation about how to use this stuff. That's what it looks like to me, anyway.
We solved the problem by adding the specific web developer in question to the Group. She received an email, was forced to open a Microsoft account, and then could access the files. In the future, we will probably just shut down the Groups completely and tell people to own their files and then just share them with people via anonymous links. - StephenRice
Hi Harold,
What you're seeing is certainly a rough edge on the product and it's one that we are quickly working to address. When looking at OneDrive and SharePoint (SharePoint being deeply connected with O365 Groups), the former is intended for files that belong to "Me" and SharePoint/Groups are for files that belong to "We" (i.e. multiple people). Our goal is for both experiences to have the same great collaboration abilities and the same great security features. Because SharePoint/Groups have an implicit concept of membership (the "Group" of people), Group files are further locked down (disabling anonymous links) for security reasons while OneDrive has anonymous enabled by default.
Today, you do have to use PowerShell to open the Group site up for broader sharing and we've heard lots of feedback that the experience is, well, suboptimal :) The new SharePoint admin center (which started rolling out recently) is going to make this entire experience much better for you. While PowerShell can certainly be useful, we don't want to make it a requirement for using O365 effectively (especially for smaller businesses which may not have dedicated IT departments).
If you need step-by-step instructions on enabling anonymous sharing for your Groups, shoot me a PM and I can send you each command you'll need to run to make this all work. Thanks!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
- Ironically, OneDrive is actually two different drives: The OneDrive product and then the Office 365 Groups. I think it might be easier to share files if you avoid Office 365 Groups entirely. The OneDrive part of OneDrive seems to have easier ways to do anonymous sharing
Understood.
PowerShell is actually needed only to tenant admins, in order to configure less common options.
So, if you aren't the tenant admin, you can ask your admin to configure the relevant options.
If you are instead the tenant admin, then you need to do a little effort and learn the basics of PowerShell.
Otherwise, you will only scratch the surface of Office 365, IMHO.
Just my opinion, of course...
- We needed email, spreadsheets, and word processing also, and Dropbox does not have those. So we bought Office 365 from GoDaddy for $7.99 per month per user. Buying Dropbox also would be a waste of money, so it was viewed as an either/or choice. Since Dropbox did not have email, we went with Microsoft. But the sharing and file storage in Dropbox is much easier and more familiar to most users. I do not see Dropbox making users download command line tools and figure out the URL for their files before being able to share them.
Harold, it's not fair to compare Office 365 with Dropbox.
Office 365 is immensely more powerful, and hence more complex, than Dropbox.
So, if you don't need the power of Office 365, then stay with Dropbox, but otherwise you need to learn to manage the complexity of Office 365 in general, and of SharePoint in particular.
Also, in Office 365 it is a common pattern to have at first most options configurable only with PowerShell, with the most frequent ones arriving eventually to the UI at a later time.
In short, if you want to be proficient with Office 365, you need to be at least a little familiar with PowerShell.
What doesn't work for you in the PowerShell code described in the article I linked?
- It is not as easy as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEO7vrrm0AY
I was not able to figure out how to use PowerShell, and in my humble opinion, Dropbox's solution is easier. I could be wrong. Correct.
At the moment you need PowerShell in order to change the sharing setting for site collections connected to Groups. It will be possible to do it in the new SPO admin UI, but we don't know when.
What is the problem in using PowerShell? It is quite easy, IMHO.
It is actually impossible to do without the PowerShell according to Microsoft, see above posts by Stephen Rice.
