Enabling the “Anyone” Sharing Setting in and Office 365 Site

Julie (@jfj1997) and I are working hard on SPS New England coming up on October 28 in Burlington, MA. I wanted to set up an easy place for the speakers to drop their slide decks. We have a perfectly good Office 365 tenant, so I figured I’d just create a Document Library somewhere and share the link with the speakers so they could do so.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite so simple. (What I needed was an Anyone link, but it was grayed out. The message on hover “Your organization is preventing you from selecting this option.” didn’t help me much since, well, I am my organization! (Well, I do have to answer to Julie from time to time.) I’d love for the message to say something link “Talk to your admin about turning on Anyone sharing, as described at this link.” The Learn more link didn’t really help, either. I considered using Dropbox!

Instead of using Dropbox, since I couldn’t figure out the magic incantation to light up the Anyone link in the sharing dialog, I turned to my favorite RTFM replacement, the Twitters.

I got a bunch of suggestions, and maybe I was too dense to understand them, but I wasn’t getting any joy. Luckily, one of Microsoft’s finest employees, Tom Resing (@resing), saw my tweet:

https://twitter.com/resing/status/918612677395492865

Tom’s a swell guy, so he poked around at Microsoft and asked a few people how to do this. Today he got back to me.

Before I tweeted, I had checked the settings in the following two places, so thought I should be good.

First, the Office 365 Admin center, under Security & Privacy. That looked good.

Then I had checked in the SharePoint Admin Center under sharing, and that looked good.

It turns out there is yet another setting I needed to change. This one is in the SharePoint Admin Center and is at the individual Site Collection level under Sharing:

Even though the other settings above say that anonymous links are allowed, I still needed to say that anonymous links were allowed at the Site Collection level.

Even worse, if the site is a “modern” Office 365 Group -based site, there is no UI to change this setting yet – at least until we have the new SharePoint Admin Center. You’ll need to use Powershell (IMO, the answer should never be “you need Powershell”).

$s = Get-SPOSite -Identity "fullurl" Set-SPOSite -Identity $s -SharingCapability ExternalUserAndGuestSharing

After a few days of trying to figure out, I can start collecting slides! Thanks, Tom!

 

 

 

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13 Comments

  1. Marc, can I ask You another question? Can Your users edit these shared documents online? As I uinderstand they only can download -> Edit-> Upload them back, am I right?//

  2. Just to add to this, the new Sharepoint Admin preview allows access to a new sharing dialog for site collections (Go: Sites > Sites Management > Click site name > Properties Section > Sharing Status) where you can also update the security settings for sharing to allow “anyone”. Updated this setting and the “Anyone” sharing option was immediately available :)

  3. Just curious – because I am having this dilemma right now – why would you choose in this case sharing with anyone as opposed to sharing with specific people? If I understand your use case correctly, you are dealing with a specific list of speakers.

  4. Hello,

    If you organization does not want to enable external sharing at the root Site collection, you can create a new Site collection site with a different policy (As long as they are not over-ridden somewhere else).

  5. Had this same problem. I changed the setting everywhere except in one vital place.

    Instead of using Powershell (thank god), I had to visit the new Sharepoint Admin Center, click on Sites, click on Active sites, then selected my sharepoint site in the list and clicked Sharing and changed the settings.

    That did it. Thanks for this post, very helpful.

  6. thank you very much, glad this is till here.
    didnt need the power shell, but like all good software, searching for the right tick box is always fun.

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