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Jleebiker's avatar
Jleebiker
Iron Contributor
Nov 05, 2019
Solved

Changing a Private Sharepoint Online site to a Public one

Hey all, anyone have and advice on what is the PROPER way to take a Sharepoint Online site that was created from a MS Teams team and opening it to a Public (RO) site? We found multiple ways, but just...
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  • Trevor Seward's avatar
    Trevor Seward
    Nov 05, 2019

    Jleebiker SharePoint Online does not support public websites. Everyone has to either be a member of your organization or be explicitly invited to the site.

ChrisWebbTech's avatar
ChrisWebbTech
MVP
Nov 06, 2019
Well this isn’t entirely true 😏. Depending on full use case, You can technically use a page and share it with an anonymous link for anyone to access outside the org but this will restrict you to making sure all the content and links on that page go to anonymous shared links or photos etc to prevent ahh prompts.

I use this in my org tenant currently for a pre hire information page where they can go to get forms etc. needed to be hired on and they don’t yet have an account to our systems so HR points them to this page. All links point to individually shared documents using anon links on the org site itself along with contact info web parts and HR rep photos. Works quiet well.
jcgonzalezmartin's avatar
jcgonzalezmartin
MVP
Nov 06, 2019
Come on, anonymous access to SPO sites is not supported...that's what we mean....of course you can do some hacks to give anonymous access to specific elements (Folders, documents, pages) on SPO sites, but not to the full site.
  • ChrisWebbTech's avatar
    ChrisWebbTech
    MVP
    Nov 07, 2019
    Well. True. And I don’t expect it to be an official answer but it is technically possible and gave a use case for it. It might not work in that use case but its a visible solution to a need :).
    • Jleebiker's avatar
      Jleebiker
      Iron Contributor
      Nov 07, 2019

      Thanks ChrisWebbTech. I've asked around in a few places and what I get overwhelmingly is "It isn't supported. Forget it." Thanks for being a beacon of hope.
      One of our use-cases is preemployment onboarding so your workaround is enticing. The problem is when we have webparts that have content that require a login and are not just simple pages we can grant anon access to.

      Quite frankly, I expected better when I went digging for this. I was told numerous times to forget it. I asked why and was told "Because Microsoft doesn't support it." Cmon folks, be better than this. Push the status quo. Ask the question as to Why. After all Satya even said this week that his goal is to democratize access to data. Why not make it easy for people to access info no matter how they are creating it. Why have the barrier?

      Yes, this can be done with SP on-prem, but what about orgs that do not have an on-prem server? What about making it easy and fluid for orgs to interact with people outside their tenant? Isn't that what Microsoft wants to do?

      • Beau Cameron's avatar
        Beau Cameron
        MVP
        Nov 11, 2019

        Jleebiker Microsoft does make it easy to interact with people outside of the tenant, as external guests.  Unfortunately, you want public sites... but you are paying for a *service* and it's just not something that is offered anymore. 

        With public sites, you'd be asking Microsoft to support the infrastructure/load of N number of users to Office 365... essentially for free. That really isn't a good business model. Second,  SharePoint was never the best/easiest public facing platform. There are better web hosting providers, that make it easier to consume web content.

        My personal recommendation would to get up a site on a public hosting service such as GoDaddy/WordPress to share this kind of content.  Anonymous sharing links could work, if your sharing content such as files and don't need full fledged SharePoint features.

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