Are visitors of an O365 group site legit?

[David_Elsner]

I had an Office365 consultant here and he told me that if I put visitors in a SharePoint Teamsite that is connected to an O365 group, this is a bad practice.

He explained, that an O365 group (team, calendar etc.) does not have visitors and we should avoid doing so.

However, many people here want to give some other people reading permission.
Often people that are no direct collaborators should at least view some documents.

The consultant told me, that putting people in the Visitors group is not straightforward and not recommended by Microsoft.

The alternative should be using a communication site and publish the read-content there.

But my users struggle a lot with this, because they do not understand the purpose to copy files to a communication site. (Not to mention that they are of cause not able to create a flow to do this)

For me as an admin it also seems pretty complicated to publish things to a flow, when live could be so easy, just adding people to the visitors group.

How do you handle this?

I thought a short time about sharing a link, but for many files this also is not practiacable... 

[#2]

I don’t see any issues adding people or everyone except external users to viditors group as long as all documents within should be accessible read or read/write to other users outside the group.
Other workloads suck as calendar, teams, mailbox Will not be affected! For this you must add people to the group itself

[#3]

@adam deltinger Okay, thats good to notice. But then its hard to me to get the concrete sense of communication sites. We have very often Teams that work together and they want to publish only some or all content as read to other people. 

What about the argument of our consultants that a Team site is about collaboration, not publishing?

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Communication sites are as the name implies more about communication and information not as much collaboration. It’s not so much about the files but pages. What would be better is that you create a library with read access to everyone or more granular that is linked to both the team site and can be given to other users. Or create a comm site and link it there. Within the team site you work on your documents and put them in this library for public access

[#5]

@adam deltinger And on the communication site I just put a hyperlink, referencing the public team. Did I get you right? 

Good to know btw. that communication sites are more for site pages and not for files. 

[#6]

It’s often used as information pages with web parts and pictures and links which are referring to other pages or in this case libraries or files

[#7]

@adam deltinger okay, got you! Thanks.