Forum Discussion
Using SharePoint Online for hosting public web files
Has anyone used SharePoint as a content management system for hosting web files? If so how is it working for you? We are moving from one old cloud system to SharePoint Online and we would like to use SharePoint similarly to how we were using the old system but we have run into some issues. For example: When you create a guest link and use it on a webpage any document not native to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, will download. Videos for guest users will download instead of playing in browser. PDF's are the same. They open fine with you have access to the full site but we want anyone in the world to access these files. Also, when using guest links the long URL takes you to the actual location of the document, which doesn't keep the token from the guest url. The problem with that is when people copy and paste the short link external users do not have access to the file with out the token so users have been requesting access to that SharePoint site. Any ideas? Maybe SharePoint isn't the way to go for public documents?
5 Replies
Alternatively you can use https://docs.com - not suitable for videos, but works well with Office documents and pdfs.
- IMHO SharePoint Online is not intended for the scenario you are describing here for some good reasons:
(1) First of all, SharePoint Online is not a platform for hosting files for public web sites...it's a rich collaboration tool that is designed to easily share files with both organizational and external users.
(2) SharePoint Online is great for Intranet and Extranet scenarios, so again you have a complete different scenario over the table.
(3) I assume that for a public web site where you want to show files stored in the backend, performance is key...there are may alternatives in the Microsoft stack to provide this...you should start having a look at what Microsoft Azure can provide you in terms of file storage- Thank you! Performance is key, people want the same experience every time. We aren't looking to host web pages, just documents but seeing how they respond on our WordPress pages we were thinking this may not be a viable option. One of the reasons I was hoping this would work on SPO is the fact we could keep all contents in one place whether it is internal or external, minimal effort on our users for document management for web. I will take a look at Azure, thank you for the suggestion.
- Definitively Azure storage is the best option for you in this scenario...tell us your findings
