Friday, October 13, 2017

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:

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”). If I can find the Powershell, I’ll post it here.

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

 

 

 


by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

No comments:

Post a Comment