When the SharePoint 2013 updates start getting rolled out to your SharePoint Online sites, you will notice some changes and improvements to the external sharing capabilities in SharePoint Online:

• The experience for managing external sharing (for example, turning it on or off) has been streamlined and simplified.

• Site users will also have more options for how they choose to share content. They can:

  • Share sites or documents with external users by requiring them to sign-in to the site.

  • Share documents with anonymous users through the use of guest links

• Finally, the sign-in experience for external users who receive invitations to access or view content on SharePoint Online sites will be updated to make the experience a bit more straightforward.
  
  

Managing external sharing in Office 365 Enterprise Plans

In Office 365 Enterprise plans, SharePoint Online admins will be able to manage external sharing centrally from the SharePoint Online admin center.  On the Settings page in the SharePoint Online admin center, admins can turn external sharing on or off globally for the entire tenant, or they can choose to allow only specific kinds of external sharing (e.g., allow sharing only with sign-in).

One key change coming for Enterprise plans is that admins can also centrally manage external sharing for individual site collections directly from the SharePoint Online admin center. They can choose to turn external sharing on or off for one or more site collections or they can control which level of sharing is allowed for specific site collections.

SharePoint Online admins with Enterprise plans will also have the option of using Windows PowerShell cmdlets in the SharePoint Online Management Shell to perform tasks such viewing a list of all external users or bulk removing external users.

For more information about configuring and managing external sharing in Office 365 Enterprise plans, see Manage external sharing for your SharePoint Online environment. 

Managing external sharing in Office 365 Small Business plans

If you have an Office 365 Small Business plan, the admin experience for managing external sharing is even more streamlined. You have a simple on/off switch in the Office 365 Service Settings for the external sharing feature. You can also use the Remove individual external users link to remove external users so that they no longer have access to sites or content that has been shared with them.

For more information about managing external sharing in Office 365 Small Business plans, see Manage sharing with external users. Sharing content.

Sharing content

For site users, the option to share is easy to discover and use. You can use the Share command to quickly invite users to access a site. You can send invitations to any email address. Invitation recipients can sign in using a Microsoft account or a Microsoft Office 365 user ID.

The process for sharing documents with users by requiring sign-in is the same (although you would click the Share command from the document’s menu).

For more information about how to share sites or documents, see Share sites or documents with people outside your organization. 

Thanks for reading!

Laura

SharePoint IW Content Team