Upcoming change:Updating default sharing setting for Office 365 Group connected SPO site collections

[Tejas Mehta]

[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

[#2]

Great, thanks!  Any others with feedback on this slightly tweaked approach?

[#3]

Hi Tejas,

Can you confirm that if my tenant's settings are set to: Allow users to invite and share with authenticated external users.

Then my newly created groups will be set to this when this change comes through to us.

Thanks.

[#4]

AFAIK you still need to do the PowerShell stuff, I have not seen / heard anything about changing this behavior yet

[#5]

A much more involved set of discussions not withstanding, when is SPO going to version their changes rather than arbitrarily impose them and the sometimes considerably significant impacts on customer organization, process, and investments? Purchasers of cloud services were never made aware of risks nor realized expectations of stability and manageable change were fallacy. Microsoft must realize one thing purchased need remain that thing and differences then are in fact now a different thing that they must choose or reject, not forcibly be confronted with risks and implied responsibilities requiring address.

[#6]

Only the document

[#7]

Hello everyone, apologies for the delay.  We are beginning to roll out the changes to First Release customers this week, and will follow with broader expansion to production tenants worldwide.

Thanks,
Tejas

[#8]

Hi Tejas,

I now have multiple if not all of my external users locked out and being asked to authenticate with a username and password that doesn't accept their email and password for those values. How do I stop this as it is creating havoc! My technical abilities are very limited regarding Sharepoint. Please can you point me in the right direction.

Thanks

Allan

[#9]

Hi Allen - not sure the issue you are experiencing is related to the update described in this thread.  Is this issue happening to existing sites?  Or new ones?  All sites?  What is the external sharing setting on these?

Might be challenging to debug on this thread - please open a support ticket if the issue persists.

Thanks,

Tejas

[#10]

Hi Allan,

Are external users getting a message saying this file was shared with john.smith@externalcompany.com but js123@externalcompany.com is trying to open this file? Whereby this is actually the same person?

[#11]

Hi @Tejas Mehta, did this "We've added a feature to our backlog that would allow for admins to specify the default sharing setting for site collections in a tenant" get rolled out / is their a timeline?  Thanks John

[#12]

@Deleted

This feature is included in the new Sharepoint Admin Center.

See https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Change-Alerts/New-SharePoint-Admin-Center/td-p/144578

[#13]

Hi @Salvatore Biscari.  Are their plans to enable / the ability to set the default behavior back to ExistingExternalUserSharingOnly for all new sites at creation?  We would like to have this control in place, so we can still enable Teams and SharePoint Sharing, but only on request and workflow approval.  Thanks again!  John

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@Salvatore Biscari wrote:

@Deleted

This feature is included in the new Sharepoint Admin Center.

See https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Change-Alerts/New-SharePoint-Admin-Center/td-p/144578

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[#14]

I hope so.

Perhaps @Tejas Mehta can say us more...

[#15]

Hey all,

I can speak to this. The new SharePoint admin center will let you change the sharing setting for Group connected sites but it will not let you choose the default sharing setting for sites. This work is still on the backlog and we don't have a timeline to offer just yet. Thanks!

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II