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Dean_Gross's avatar
Dean_Gross
Silver Contributor
Nov 30, 2018

External Sharing Policy change all existing sites

One of my customers recently enabled external sharing at the tenant level, and almost all of the existing sites are now showing "This site can be shared with new and existing external users who sign ...
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ChrisWebbTech's avatar
ChrisWebbTech
MVP
Nov 30, 2018
It’s always been that way. The sharing will go to “specific users” if you want anonymous links thou you have to explicitly set it per site but all sites not manually set will go up to specific users.
Dean_Gross's avatar
Dean_Gross
Silver Contributor
Nov 30, 2018

Ok, thanks. I guess now we have to go turn it off on a bunch of sites, ugh.

 

ChrisWebbTechi have done some more investigation and I'm not seeing consistent behavior, there are some group enabled sites that were not changes and many that did change. Any idea why that would have happened?

  • ChrisWebbTech's avatar
    ChrisWebbTech
    MVP
    Nov 30, 2018
    Some were manually changed at some point and others not? Possible that one of the site template types, (Group, Team etc.) may have this property explicitly set. The problem is it's really hard to tell because they all say what they are and don't really tell you if it inherits or not from what I'm finding.
    • StephenRice's avatar
      StephenRice
      Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
      Dec 03, 2018

      ChrisWebbTech is correct. An example:

       

      1) Tenant is set to allow anyone links. Site is set to allow anyone links.

      2) Tenat is restricted to authenticated sharing only. By policy, site can now only offer authenticated sharing too (and so will show up as such in admin UI) even though it's saved value is "anyone" links.

      3) Tenant is set to allow anyone links again. Site now allows anyone links again (because it's value never changed).

       

      Hope that helps!

       

      Stephen Rice

      OneDrive Program Manager II

      • Dean_Gross's avatar
        Dean_Gross
        Silver Contributor
        Dec 04, 2018

        StephenRicethanks for the information, it was my understanding that enabling an external sharing option would only make each site eligible for sharing, but that sharing would have to be activate on a site by site basis. I am quite sure that this is the way that it used to work. I am very concerned that many site collections just had external sharing enabled without the site owners knowledge.

        The tenant setting was changed to "Allow users to invite and share with authenticated external users" and now, many  sites are set to "This site can be shared with new and existing external users who sign in" but some are still set to "This site can’t be shared with external users", which is what they were before the tenant setting change. Why did some sites change and some not?

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