Forum Discussion
Access requests external sharing
I have now allowed external sharing with anyone on my tenant from the admin center, on the site collection, on the site permission and i have also enabled access requests at all levels.
I'm trying to open the link to a document from an user outside the organization
Expected behaviour:
Access Request form is displayed
Actual behaviour:
An error is displayed which roughly translates to: is not in the directory
How can I allow access requests to a single document from external users? Which link should i share to external users in order for them to try opening it and then receive the access request form?
As Juan mentioned, only member users and guest (external) users in your tenant can request access to SharePoint resources (Sites, folders, files, ..) where they currently don't have access to. You can check with users are authenticated guest users in your tenant either on the O365 Admin Center or in Azure AD. It's important to understand the different between external guest users that appear in the AD tenant, and external users that where only send a link to get access to a folder/file.
See What happens when I share a site or document on https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/external-sharing-overview
Hope that helps
Gunter
- You need to use the "Share" button on your document library on an individual file, or folder. Once you select this then you can choose your audience. In your case it appears you are trying to copy a link from the URL bar and send it to someone expecting anyone external to access which doesn't work that way.
If you are wanting anonymous links to documents, then you use Share and the "Anyone" option. And in order to make Anyone available on SharePoint site once you allow it via the admin center is powershell (or new admin center).
The powershell command is set-sposite -identity "SiteURL" -sharingcapability ExternalUserAndGuestSharing
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/set-sposite?view=sharepoint-ps
You can also use new SharePoint admin center, when you go to the details of the site, you can set the sharing capability on the details pane towards the bottom.- Well, I guess I should have more carefully read your question. That's how to easily share externally without dealing with request access, but if you need externals to request access you would have to first add them to your site, then when they try to access content on the site that has inheritance broken, you should be able to then get an access request, but then you'll have to know who's trying to access the site ahead of time.
You do have options around Flow, where you could probably build a request access form via Microsoft Forms, then have a flow take that response and generate an approval, then a sharing link from that approval, but that's the only thing that comes to mind for some kind of request scenario for an external user.
- Are those external users already part of your tenant? If not, the behaviour you are getting is correct according to your setup
