Forum Discussion
Changing a Private Sharepoint Online site to a Public one
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.
See, now THAT's the kind of answer I was looking for. Thanks Beau Cameron for the WHY behind the reason.
Would it be safe to assume it could still be used as a B2B solution where we know the people wanting access? If it is a capacity issue, do you have any guidelines as to when a site should be considered a candidate for putting on a dedicated B2C type solution? Thanks for the dialogue!
Jleebiker Well the discussion really depends on the definition of B2C. Not only for your company, but in the eyes of Microsoft Tenants. In the outside world, we think of B2C as essentially public.
In the Microsoft Tenant world, B2C carries some of the same methodologies of the ability for non-organizational people to gain access to your content...However, Office 365 is a licensed service, meaning users who access content within your environment need licenses (either granted by you, or granted via External User flow).
I personally, do not like the idea of anonymous sharing links and in fact recommend disabling anonymous sharing links. Which makes my decision quite easy... if I have something that can be accessed by anyone, I stick it in a public site. I've built integrations with WordPress to copy/sync documents to a public word press site for this exact scenario. It benefits you for a couple of reasons.
1. You don't have to worry about access to your company's Office 365 Environment. If you have external sharing on, and anonymous links... without more IT oversight (though external perms can be managed at the site level), implementation of S&C services likes DLP, you are opening up the possibility of allowing your users to share internal content... that they shouldn't.
2. Being on a public platform allows you to create a nice looking web site, with your branding, corporate messaging and streamlined permissions management. SharePoint has never been a leader in WCM.
- I don't recommend disabling anyone links -- then you end up with uncontrolled email, a much worse scenario where you've lost all control over the content.