External Sharing Features of Microsoft SharePoint
The external sharing features of Microsoft SharePoint allow users to share content in their respective organizations with people outside the organization, including vendors, dealers, partners, clients, or customers. You can use external sharing with licensed users on multiple 365 subscriptions.
SharePoint is a site where you can collaborate with colleagues and external users safely regardless of any location. To share information with external users, you need to have a site collection that are enabled of external sharing; otherwise, it won’t work.
You can enable it on communication sites and classic team sites that are supported by the SharePoint admin center or by default available on these sites. Some of the features include.
1. Collaboration with Guests On A Document Or In A Site
If you need to collaborate with your guests outside your organization on documents via SharePoint, you can share a link to that document. Sharing in Microsoft 365 is governed in the Azure Active directory at the highest level by organizational relationships.
They recommend using Microsoft Teams, which provide all the collaboration features available in Office and SharePoint with unique and tenacious chat and a customizable and extensible set of collaboration tools in unified user experience.
Collaboration on sites can quickly be done on connected Microsoft 365 groups and manage the membership with additional tools such as shared mailbox and calendar.
2. Security and Privacy
It also features the security level an organization demands by storing the confidential information in a site with external sharing. This helps you manage all the security risks any organization wanted to be preventive about all the sensitive information. And for the ones you want to hide stuff from, you create additional sites as per your need for the external sharing.
3. Microsoft 365 Group-Connected Team Sites
When you or your users create Microsoft 365 groups in outlook or Microsoft teams, a SharePoint team site is created. For group-connected team sites, the group owners are added as sites owner, and members are added as group members. By adding more people, you can share sites in the Microsoft 365 group, but only the site is sharable.
4. Share with People Outside The Organisation
When users wanted to share outside the organization, an invitation is sent to the person in the email regarding the link to that site.
When users share sites, the recipient will be prompted to sign in with a Microsoft account or a work or school account in Azure AD from another organization. Recipients who provide their verification codes by their respective accounts can share files from the organization with them. If they belong to school or work accounts, they are asked to enter codes the first time.
They will be added as a guest and can sign in with their organization’s username and password. If they don’t belong to any of these organizations, they have to enter code each time they sign in to your file and folders but not added in the directory.
5. Recipients Who Don’t Need To Authenticate
Those who don’t need to verify can access files and folders without signing in or provide a code. They can use it freely and passed around until the link is valid and not deleted or expires. You can identify the person using, but their IP addresses are recorded in audit logs when accessing or editing shared content.
6. Stop Sharing
If you want to stop sharing with guests, you can simply remove their permissions from the shared items or remove them as a guest from your directory. You can stop sharing with anyone by deleting the links for them by going into the file or folder.
Final Verdict on Sharing Features of Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft provides you with all you need for your better and safer sharing experience. Even their technical department are a touch away to help you out. The external sharing features of Microsoft SharePoint features are reliable, improvised, and feasible for every user and organization.