Forum Discussion
Will anonymous external sharing be disabled: New ways to govern access of external users
IMHO, you are not correct.
What will change is that external users will see only the content that has been shared directly with them or with Groups to which the external users belong.
This applies only to external users which are required to sign-in, while anonymous sharing will continue to work as usual.
MicrosoftHi Harold,
What you're seeing is certainly a rough edge on the product and it's one that we are quickly working to address. When looking at OneDrive and SharePoint (SharePoint being deeply connected with O365 Groups), the former is intended for files that belong to "Me" and SharePoint/Groups are for files that belong to "We" (i.e. multiple people). Our goal is for both experiences to have the same great collaboration abilities and the same great security features. Because SharePoint/Groups have an implicit concept of membership (the "Group" of people), Group files are further locked down (disabling anonymous links) for security reasons while OneDrive has anonymous enabled by default.
Today, you do have to use PowerShell to open the Group site up for broader sharing and we've heard lots of feedback that the experience is, well, suboptimal :) The new SharePoint admin center (which started rolling out recently) is going to make this entire experience much better for you. While PowerShell can certainly be useful, we don't want to make it a requirement for using O365 effectively (especially for smaller businesses which may not have dedicated IT departments).
If you need step-by-step instructions on enabling anonymous sharing for your Groups, shoot me a PM and I can send you each command you'll need to run to make this all work. Thanks!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
I downloaded the PowerShell in an attempt to get it working, but did not see any documentation on it beyond what I could get at the command line. I think the farthest I got was
get-help Set-SPOSite -detailed.
But then there were a lot of options without any description (such as Identity) without any description of how to figure out what they were.
So, my conclusion is that this must only be meant for internal Microsoft developers, since there is no documentation about how to use this stuff. That's what it looks like to me, anyway.
We solved the problem by adding the specific web developer in question to the Group. She received an email, was forced to open a Microsoft account, and then could access the files. In the future, we will probably just shut down the Groups completely and tell people to own their files and then just share them with people via anonymous links.
- The final command should be
Get-SPOSite -Identity https://netorgftxxxxxxx.sharepoint.com/sites/marketing -Detailed
Replace xxxxxxx with your tenant id, and replace marketing with your site name. Those who looks for the steps to enable this feature manually, this Blog article may be helpful.
- StephenRice
Hi Harold,
That's great! Glad to hear it worked okay!
And I just double checked the documentation, the final command is actually -Detailed (which returns SharingCapability) instead of what I had above. Either way, if you can get an anonymous link, then everything worked right!
If you have any other questions, let me know!Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
- That worked except for the last command. But I verified that the other commands worked by creating an anonymous link.
Get-SPOSite -Identity https://netorgftxxxx.sharepoint.com/sites/Sales18 -SharingCapability
Get-SPOSite : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'SharingCapability'.
At line:1 char:76
+ ... tps://netorgftxxxx.sharepoint.com/sites/Sales18 -SharingCapability
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [Get-SPOSite], ParameterBindingException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NamedParameterNotFound,Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell.GetSite - StephenRice
Hi Harold,
Totally understand. If you want to keep using OneDrive for your company, that's certainly an option. In case it is of value, here is what you will need to do for PowerShell
Connect-SPOService -Url https://<mycompany>-admin.sharepoint.com
(this will pop a prompt for your admin credentials)
Set-SPOSite -Identity https://<mycompany>.sharepoint.com/sites/<restofsiteurl> -SharingCapability ExternalUserAndGuestSharing
(this will allow anonymous links on that site)
You can then use "Get-SPOSite -Identity https://<mycompany>.sharepoint.com/sites/<restofsiteurl> -SharingCapability to confirm the value was set.
Hope that helps!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
