External Users In SharePoint Online/ Office 365 - Part Two

This is the second part of the article, in the first part we understood what are the external users, how to allow external users access to SharePoint online at tenancy level or at site collection level. In this article I’ll share more details.

If you didn’t get a chance to read part 1 please have a look once,

• External Users in SharePoint Online/ Office 365 - Part One

Restrictions to External users on shared site - There are few restrictions on external users; they cannot perform the following tasks in SharePoint online site:

1. User Profile related tasks
   
   I. External users cannot create their personal sites
   II. External users cannot edit their profiles.
   
   
2. External user cannot access the site mailbox.
   
   
3. Search
   
   I. External users cannot access search center site.
   II. External users cannot search against “EveryThing”.
   
   
4. External user cannot use eDiscovery.
   
   
5. External users cannot use Visio services.
   
   
6. External users cannot view the organization wide newsfeed but they can view site news feed.
   
   
7. External users cannot be site collection administrators.
   
   
8. External users cannot add storage to storage pool.
   
   
9. External users cannot access SharePoint online data connection libraries.

Ways to share the content with External Users: There are three different ways to share the content,

1. We can share an complete site.
   
   
2. We can share an individual document.
   
   
3. We can share guest link that users can use to view individual documents anonymously.

Regarding Invitation of sharing to External Users:

1. Once we share content (site / document / link) to external user invitation is automatically sent to the person who is invited.
   
   
2. User who accepts the invitation must sign with Microsoft account like live.com or outlook.com or any other Office 365 account.
   
   
3. User must need to accept the invitation within seven days, if within seven days invitation is not accepted it will expire.
   
   
4. If external user already accepted the invitation, and we want to remove the sharing then we can do that by removing external user from respective group.

Few important points to be considered while sharing the content:

1. If sharing for external user is disabled at tenant level then sharing is not possible at site collection level.
   
   
2. Changes made to external access settings might take time up to 60 minutes, changes may not be happen immediately.
   
   
3. For SharePoint online admin, there is no way to get the list of all sites in tenant which is shared with external users.
   
   
4. Only users who have full control and site owners are allowed to share the sites and documents.
   
   
5. While sharing document or through anonymous links, Edit or View permissions can be assigned.
   
   
6. After sharing the content with external users, if we disable sharing and again enable it, external users to whom initially content shared, will regain the access.
   
   
7. When we disable sharing at site collection level, external users permissions permanently get deleted

References:

1. Manage external sharing for your SharePoint Online environment
   
2. Share sites or documents with people outside your organization
   
3. Manage sharing with external users in Office 365 Small Business