Best SharePoint Practices for External Sharing of Documents

4 years ago
Best SharePoint Practices for External Sharing of Documents

SharePoint is one of the most popular collaboration tools that enterprises use to share their documents across their network. Microsoft has been continuously improving the controls and user experience for sharing files using SharePoint Online for both the administrators and the users. With per site sharing settings, expiration controls for sharing the links and the new sharing dialog and etc. just to name a few.

Every organization needs to share some content or the other with the end users, clients or partners who are not within the organization. It is through external sharing that the users of an organization can easily share their content with the outside users without having to create separate accounts for them. The users can also contribute to the growth of the organization. External sharing offers access to some content that you may not be willing to share with people outside the organization as it raises the security concerns. There it needs proper planning and following some best practices.

Here in this blog, I will share with you some of the tips that can help your SharePoint development website to share content easily.

While sharing your important documents, you may feel that some sensitive information may get shared with unauthorized users and disabling the external sharing in your SharePoint application is not a great idea as you will not be able to use the benefits of external sharing. So, here you can follow some best practices and also train your users to implement them:

Secure Share

The first step is to share your content securely and after sharing the link with the user, they need to sign in by using the same account to which the sharing invitations are sent and ensure that your guests also know what they are doing. You should restrict the external users to share such documents.

Also Read:How SharePoint Intranet Helps To Manage Work during the Corona Outbreak

Restrict Anonymous Access: 

Don’t share any content by using anonymous links as all these don’t require sign in.  So any user can easily access the content and also misuse it. If needed, set the expiration, block the download and password using the anonymous links. Keep the track of those links so that you can also un-share whenever needed.

Restrict Sharing Documents Using SharePoint:

You should share the documents only with trusted and authenticated users. So keep a track of the sharing activities and know with whom the files are shared. To ensure secure sharing, you can easily restrict the sharing of the content by blocking the specific domains.

Check the Sharing Activity from Time to Time:

It is very important to keep a check of the sharing activities, so that any unauthorized access can be better traced like the files and folders in use, lists or libraries and the external users having access to the content.  It is recommended to have an appropriate governance policy so that you can adopt the best approaches while sharing the documents. Ask your SharePoint development company to add a security tool for completely track all sharing activities.

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