How does opening up external sharing affect existing and new site sharing settings?

[LucidBike1140]

We currently only allow internal sharing in SharePoint, but are considering allowing external sharing.  I've read through the documentation, but what happens to existing and new sites is still unclear.  If I open up the global setting (will probably go with new and existing guests), will that also bump up all existing site settings?  (My guess is they will stay where they are.)  Will new sites get the new global setting? (My guess is they will).

If that is the case, is there a way to set new sites to have a more restrictive setting when they are created?  This also includes SharePoint sites that are created along with a Microsoft Team.

And finally, I assume that once I enable external sharing, users or site owners will not get a notification.  Is that correct?

[#2]

Hi, you are right about the first thing. You will not "bump up" all existing as you're simply changing the org-wide default setting. New sites being created (without a group connected) have a default setting of "Only people in your organization" and when you create a new with a M365 group connected, which is required for a team, the default setting is "New and existing guests". Let's say you would have changed the org-wide setting to "Anyone" you'd still have to go a specific site to change that by clicking on the link in the site/group/team sharing settings to "Reset to organization-level settings".

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Thanks, Christian!