Let's start by doing an overview of
external sharing in SharePoint Online.
SharePoint Online allows you to share
multiple types of documents or artifacts
outside of your organization. You can
share everything from a complete site to a
list or library to only a specific
document or folder. There's also multiple
ways to share stuff, depending on what you
want to share. We also have multiple types
of external users, the first one being an
authenticated external user. Those users
need to prove ownership of an email
address before being able to access the
resources you invite them to. You can
invite authenticated external users to
complete sites, libraries, lists,
documents, list items, or folders and
really everything inside SharePoint. The
other type of external users are anonymous
users. Those users do not need to
authenticate in order to access a
resource. Sharing to anonymous users is
done via a link and anonymous users can be
given access to documents and folders only
inside document libraries. So as you can
see, a bit more restricted than
authenticated external users in terms of
possibility. Now whenever you share stuff
inside or outside of your organization,
you will see Copy Link in a ton of places.
There are in fact multiple types of links
that you can create for a document
depending on your permissions,
requirements, and settings on that
specific site. The three types are anyone,
people in my organization, and specific
people. Let's take a look at them in
detail. The first one is the anyone link,
which is a transferrable, revocable,
secret key. What does this mean?
Transferrable means it can be forwarded to
others so anyone with a link can have
access to the resource. Revocable means
that the link can be disabled at any time
manually, and secret key means you can't
just find it on the internet; it's not
public. You need that link, that secret
key to gain access. If we put this in a
more visual aspect, once you create the
link for a document into any one model,
you can send it to an internal user, this
link can be forwarded to an external user,
and that external user can forward it to
another external user and everything will
still work. So really, as long as you have
that link, that secret key, you have
access to the document. The next type of
link is people in my organization, which
again is a transferrable, revocable secret
key, because it can be transferred to
others, it can be revoked at any time, and
you need that link to gain access.
However, it only works for users inside
your organization. So if I have a document
that I create a link for with the people
in my organization link, I can send it to
an internal user, which can then forward
the same link to another user inside the
organization, and it will work, but if I
forward it to somebody outside the
organization, they will not have access to
it. Lastly, the specific people link. The
specific people link is a
non-transferrable, revocable secret key,
which means this one will not work if it's
forwarded to anyone else. Access can still
be revoked at any time, and users need
that link to get access. Really, as the
name says, this link only grants access to
the specific recipient. So if I create a
link to share with John, John can access
the document; however, if that link is
shared with somebody inside the
organization, it will not work; they will
not be able to access the document. Now
from a licensing point of view. There is
actually no cost for inviting external
users in Office 365 to collaborate on
documents and things like that. External
users can read, create, update, and delete
documents using Office Online; however,
they cannot get the offline, the hard
client version of Office for free. If you
need them to install the hard client for
Office, you would need to assign them a license.