Forum Discussion
MicrosoftUpcoming change:Updating default sharing setting for Office 365 Group connected SPO site collections
[UPDATE] - Per feedback recieved here and elsewhere, our plan is to only turn on the external sharing setting for a group's site collection ONLY IF the tenant allows for Office 365 Groups to have guest members. I've made changes to this post below to capture, and added emphasis to call them out. Your feedback is welcome.
Hi all,
We would like to inform you of an upcoming change we are planning on making to the default value of the external sharing setting for Office 365 Group connected SPO site collections. Currently, the default sharing setting for these site collections is to allow sharing with external users already in your organization's directory.
Since Office 365 Groups allow for guest members by default, we heard feedback from many customers that it was odd to allow for the addition of external guests as group members but not allow for external sharing of SharePoint resources.
Based on your feedback, we are updating the external sharing setting to allow sharing with authenticated external users ONLY IF the tenant allows for Office 365 Groups to have guest members.
Once updated in a tenant, all new group site collections will be created with the setting for external sharing enabled ONLY IF the tenant allows for Office 365 Groups to have guest members. No change to default external sharing will occur if guests in Office 365 groups are not permitted. We will not retroactively change the setting for existing site collections.
To change the value of the sharing capability for older site collections, you can use the following PowerShell cmdlet:
Set-SPOSite -Identity https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/site1 -SharingCapability ExternalUserSharingOnly
Of course as always, SharePoint will always respect the more restrictive sharing setting when comparing the site collection's setting with that of the tenant. For example, if you disable external sharing at the tenant level, sharing with external users will be blocked for a group's site even if its sharing setting allows for external sharing.
I'll update this post when we start rolling this update out, but wanted to solicit feedback or concerns from anyone about this change. Please post below - we're happy to answer your questions.
Thanks
Tejas
54 Replies
- I don't think this is going to happen when providing access to a full SPO Site...you can shared anonymously files and folders, but IMHO it's enough....justs remember SPO Sites are not websites in the sense that anyone from the Internet can access them
- David Rosenthal
Thank you Tejas Mehta, I've been bugging Sahil Arora about this for some time now :)
I'm afraid no one setting is going to work for every customer. After this we will have to add switching it back to external sharing with people in our directory.
For Groups sites we already have concerns at the lack of customisation options. .
Being able to specify a template to a Sharepoint site when it is created by groups looks to be a required feature. To allow each organisation to configure the sites as it requires. Obviously there are reasons certain things cannot be configured or they will break. Having some options would be useful though.
For example
Giving group owners full control permission to a site and not allowing a restruiction in permission levels. I realise they need full control to add members permissions. However it also gives them the ability to modify the site away from corporate settings and worse add infopath forms.
Just my $00.02.
Very interesting change!
Tejas Mehta wrote:[..] Currently, the default sharing setting for these site collections is to allow sharing with external users already in your organization's directory.
Since Office 365 Groups allow for guest members by default, we heard feedback from many customers that it was odd to allow for the addition of external guests as group members but not allow for external sharing of SharePoint resources.
Based on your feedback, we are updating the external sharing setting to allow sharing with authenticated external users. [..]
I am totally not getting it. Quoted above (emphasis mine):
You say that by default it is already set to allow sharing with external users. Then you say that it is odd that it doesn't allow sharing. And then you are updating the setting to allow sharing with external users!!
Am I missing something entirely here?
The current default is
ExistingExternalUserSharingOnly
The new default will be
ExternalUserSharingOnly
This means that you will be able to invite new external users while sharing.
- Does this mean when I share a single document with an external user, they become a member of the Office 365 Group? Does this mean they will also receive conversations? Or is it that the document and only the document is shared with the external user?
- Thanks for this update Tejas!!
