Do you use external sharing in Office 365? If so, your users can share files with external contacts outside of your company. This article will explain how external sharing works and show you the different ways external sharing can be used in Office 365 for your business.

What does external sharing in Office 365 mean?

When you use external sharing in Office 365, external users can share their files with your external mailbox. An external user does not have an Exchange Online license, and that’s outside your organization. External sharing allows them to share files without giving out sensitive information like a password or a username.

External users are generally not allowed to access the organization’s resources directly from external networks. This means that external users cannot connect to your on-premises Exchange Server and Outlook Web App (OWA) services through a web browser or using ActiveSync on their mobile devices. They can only use these services by connecting through an external gateway.

This is done with the help of two types of authentication systems: Basic authorization and Forms Based Authentication (FBA).

How to Turn external sharing on/off for Office 365?

By turning external sharing on at the organization level, you can enable site collections for sharing externally. In turn, sites and documents in a site collection enabled for sharing can be shared quickly after that.

Steps:

  • As a global admin, sign in to Office 365.
  • Click on the app launcher icon in Office 365 (at the upper-left corner).
  • To open Microsoft 365 admin center, choose Admin. If you can’t find the Admin tile, you don’t have Office 365 administrator permissions, get it, and then get started.
  • Choose Admin centers > SharePoint
  • Click sharing in the left pane
  • Choose one of the options from the dropdown box appearing in there, as per your organizational sharing needs.

You are done and good to go!

Admin has access to additional settings where they can specify; who can share outside your organization. Find Microsoft Teams Intranet.

While using these settings, you can limit sharing/access to users of a specific security group. This lets you manage who sends sharing invitations to external users in Office 365.

Choose “Let only users in selected security groups share with authenticated external users” or “Let only users in selected security groups share with verified external users.” Here you can specify the security group that you want to use.

To plan for external sharing or external users in Office 365 is essential and should be considered an essential task as part of the overall permissions planning for SharePoint Online.

If you wish to learn more about SharePoint or external users in Office 365, contact TITAN for expertise and details.