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Jeff Williams's avatar
Jeff Williams
Iron Contributor
Jul 27, 2019
Solved

Questions about Communications Sites and Permissions

So I have a scenario where I need a SharePoint site that basically needs to be accessible by a ton of guests. 

 

We are a membership organization we currently use Facebook group but it doesn't really fit the bill.  To difficult to control the content and conversation.

 

I have created a SharePoint Communication Site, made it a Hub site, and turn on allowing guest access.  This works.  I can add members individually.  My problem is, there will be multiple Communications sites in the Hub site.  Assigning a site to a hub site doesn't do anything to the permissions of that site.  This means individually assigning each user to the site (can't seem to use security groups either).  

 

So my thought was office 365 group, but I really don't need all the things that come with that (SharePoint team site, planner, etc.).  But I do need want a Yammer group.  So I thought okay  Yammer groups are office 365 group connected I'll just do that.  But office 365 connected yammer groups don't work with guests of the group.  You actually need to create an external yammer group and ounce again assign access to each user.  That is a places of places to have to go to assign/remove permission when a person either get or is removed from the membership.  

 

It seams like guest/external sharing is still not the best story in Microsoft 365's ecosystem.  I was wondering if anyone has done something similar or has any ideas.  I really do like SharePoint, in many ways it seems like it would be the proper tool for this, so it would be great if there was a better way to manage it.

 

 

admin
Permissions
security
SharePoint Online

8 Replies

    • Jeff Williams's avatar
      Jeff Williams
      Iron Contributor
      Jul 27, 2019

      ChrisHoardMVP 

      Thanks for the response.  It seems like pretty much what I have done, except it uses a classic site instead of a modern site.  But the steps for invitation, etc. seems to be the same.  Inviting and then removing individual users.  

       

      Still will have the same issue of multiple site permission in a site hub are different, etc.  

      I did see that when you invite a user, a guest user is created when they accept the invite.  You can then go into Azure AD and add them to a security group.  Its a second step, and there doesn't not seem to be a way to way to automate or at least get a notification when the user answers the invite (because the account doesn't get created in Azure AD until they do that).  But anyway, doing it from Azure AD seems to allow you to add a guest account to a security group.  Just cant do it from the Office 365 admin.

       

      Better but still a little bit of a pain.

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