Global Sharing Settings - Sharepoint vs Onedrive - How restrictive are your settings?

[Mike Boehm]

Howdy,

We currently have our settings set so that no one can share anything outside the organization.  However, we've had times when it woudl be very helpful to share a screenshot or something with an external person, or post a link to one on a forum like this, and currently we can't do that.

As a test I tried to set mu personal settings to allow me to share external but it said I had to choose a more restrictive setting.

I took a look in the sharing area and see the two separate sliders in there for SharePoint vs OneDrive and we have both of them all the way at the bottom.  Since OneDrive is inside of SharePoint, I don't quite get how those sliders affect one another.

If I set the SP slider at the top and leave the OD slider at the bottom, what exactly would that allow?  We use Teams for all our shared documents and that's also in SP so would that allow anyone to share any file from in Teams with anyone, anywhere?

What settings do you use in your tenants?  We want to keep our data safe but don't want to make it a pain for people to their jobs if they'd need to post a picture somewhere or something like that.

Thanks!

[#2]

OneDrive Sharing settings can be managed independently using the OneDrive Slider, but if you start touching the SPO sharing slider you will see that there is a direct relation with the OneDrive one so if you restrict how sharing is done in SPO you are restricting in ODFB too....my advice here is to take advantage of the fact that you can set granular sharing configuration at thte site level

[#3]

I keep both sliders all the way up. This allows anyone links in OneDrive, but by default will leave group connect / Team connected sites as "Specific people" only options. As Juan said you can run powershell and restrict all your SharePoint sites from Sharing, but honestly, if you restrict documents, all you are doing is making it harder for them to Share, if they wan't do, nothing keeps them from downloading the file and tossing it as an attachment in e-mail.

Do you restrict sending attachments in e-mail? If your answer is no, it's better that they Share the document than to make a copy and send it on. At least with Sharing, you have audit logs to determine what files were accessed by whom.

I dunno, just a few thoughts behind my reasoning to not restrict it down. To each their own on the topic, but best way I've had is allow it all, and set the default setting to specific people and not have the default anyone links, this makes people consciously think about their sharing options.

[#4]

Hi all,

Looks like @Chris Webb has been giving the best guidance but I'll plug this article from our side as well :) 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/external-sharing-overview

If you have other questions though, please let me know!

Stephen Rice

Senior Program Manager, OneDrive