• Case Studies
  • Partner with us
  • About Us
  • The Hub
  • Log in
AMT Evolve AMT Evolve
MENUMENU
  • Home
    • About us
    • Contact Us
  • 365 Services
        • Services

        • Where are you on your Office 365 Journey?

              ~ Starting out

              ~ Doing more

              ~ Diving deep

          Click here to find out how we can support your project.

        • Manage my 365
        • Take control of your Microsoft 365 environment with AMT's new Manage My 365 Package.
        • Strategy and Planning
          • Digital Roadmap
          • Governance
          • Security
        • Data Management
          • Data Analysis and Dashboards
          • SQL Server Auditing
          • SQL Server Development
        • User Adoption Services
          • Onboarding & Support
          • Intranet Management
          • Training & Workshops
        • Security
          • Security Audit and Strategy
          • Office 365 Security Management
        • Information Management
          • Document Management
          • Data Governance and GDPR
          • Migration: Sharepoint/Office 365
        • System Development
          • SharePoint
          • PowerApps
          • SQL Server
        • We offer a full range of services in Office 365 and SharePoint
          Call our friendly team on 0800 849 3018

  • Technologies
        • Technologies

        • Where are you on your Office 365 Journey?

              ~ Starting out

              ~ Doing more

              ~ Diving deep

          Click here to find out how we can support your project.

        • Office 365
          • Consultancy
          • Support
          • Migration
          • Development
          • Training
        • SQL Server
          • Health Check
          • Data analysis
          • Design and Build
          • Support
        • SharePoint
          • Consultancy
          • Support
          • Migration
          • Development
          • Training
          • Intranets
        • PowerApps And Flow
          • App Development
          • Integration
        • Microsoft Teams
          • *NEW* Virtual Teams Training
          • *NEW* The Complete Teams Package
          • Training & Workshops
          • Best practice advice
          • Support
        • Power BI
          • Reporting & Dashboards
          • Design
          • Support
        • We offer a full range of services in Office 365 and SharePoint
          Call our friendly team on 0800 849 3018

  • Products
        • Products

        • Where are you on your Office 365 Journey?

              ~ Starting out

              ~ Doing more

              ~ Diving deep

          Click here to find out how we can support your project.

        • The Hub
        • SharePoint Intranet Accelerator

          Turn Office 365 into a fully featured Corporate Intranet

          Find out more >>

        • SharePoint Apps And Tools
        • Meeting Management
          • Manage attendees, papers and actions
        • Mandatory Read
          • Ensure staff read important documents
        • Employee Services
          • Book holidays, manager sickness, securely store employee records
        • AMT Academy
          • *NEW* Virtual Teams Training
          • Online Training
          • Online Support
          • Onsite Onboarding
          • Office 365 Training Courses
        • We offer a full range of services in Office 365 and SharePoint
          Call our friendly team on 0800 849 3018

  • Resources
        • Resources

        • Want to catch all of AMT’s resources in one place?

              ~ Blog Posts

              ~ Videos

              ~ Training

          Click here to see everything you need to support your Microsoft 365 journey!

        • Webinars
        • Thursdays at 2pm, click here for the latest webinar schedule.

        • Latest Blogs
        • Recent Posts

          • Microsoft 365 Updates: February 2021
          • PowerApps List Sorting
          • Managing Teams Groups: Preventing Chaos 
          • What is Manage My Teams?
          • Counting Beyond your Delegation Limit in Powerapps
        • Latest News
        • RSS The Official Microsoft Blog

          • Empowering her empowers all of us
          • New industry clouds offer launchpad for innovation
          • Include 2021: A global event to engage on challenging topics to accelerate diversity and inclusion
          • Black History Month 2021: One ally’s perspective
          • Investing to grow in and with Atlanta
        • White Papers
          • Digital Transformation with Office 365
          • Developing Business Apps on SharePoint Online
        • Case Studies
          • Pearl and Dean
          • WightLink
          • Apollo Fire
          • North East Ambulance Service
          • Trimline Ltd
          • Jewish Care
        • We offer a full range of services in Office 365 and SharePoint
          Call our friendly team on 0800 849 3018

Let's talk

Best Practices for External Sharing

October 10, 2018 Editorial Team News, Office 365, SharePoint

As it hints at in the name, SharePoint is great for sharing documents. 

Emailing attachments is quick and easy, but it has limitations. In the world of GDPR these can be quite significant. Once an attachment has been emailed, you’ve lost control of its security. It can be forwarded, modified, left hanging around in people’s inboxes. When you need people to comment on the document, they might all add updates/ comments and send the copies back. This would leave you wading through the copies one by one,  to update it. What a waste of time.

Sharing a document, especially externally, can feel quite scary.

You’re giving somebody access directly into your SharePoint site to look at your live document, which just kind-of feels wrong! What if they share the link with other people? What if they download the document and send it to other people, or see some changes that you’ve made forgetting that they can see them?

From a security point of view, sharing is better than sending attachments. Generally, when you create a link to send externally, it will have a built-in expiry date. After a couple of weeks, the link will stop working. Links can be restricted to specific people who log in to your site using their own Office 365 username and password, and are then prevented from downloading the file. You can even track where your file is being opened from and revoke access if anything looks suspicious. However, you will need to have the correct licence to be able to do this.

How many times have you sent a document on an email and immediately seen a glaring spelling mistake?

That’s fine with sharing – you simply correct the mistake and save the document – by the time your colleagues click the link and open the document, all is well. And when they add their comments, they can see everybody else’s comments at the same time and properly collaborate with them.

So, when you the time comes for you to enter into the world of external sharing, here are some tips on how to manage and control what people see and do.

How to manage External Sharing

In SharePoint, you have a lot of control over how sharing is set up. Sharing policies are set up at an organisation-wide level, and these top-level settings will determine what can and can’t be done further down. Various settings can then be made at a Site Collection and Site level.

At the organisation level, you need to decide your overall policy. You can:

  • Totally turn off External sharing for SharePoint and OneDrive.
  • Allow sharing, but only for external people who you have pre-authorised.
  • Allow sharing using single-use links that require people to validate who they are.
  • Create anonymous links. These can only be to documents or libraries, not to whole sites.
sharing-outside-your-organisation
Global settings

You can’t give looser controls than these top-level settings for any site. Because of this, you need to be careful not to be too restrictive. Users will always find a workaround if the technology they are given doesn’t allow them to do their job. If you are too restrictive, it will be difficult to wean people off sending attachments.

Fine-Grained Control

Most organisations will have documents that they really don’t want shared outside. This can be for sensitive business information, or to protect client and staff confidentiality. The easiest way to manage this is to create separate Site Collections that have more restrictive rules applied.

Similarly to managing SharePoint permissions, the higher up you can impose rules, the easier it will be to manage the rules in the future. You can set rules for individual sites, but you must be careful to keep good documentation as to what rules are in place and where.

access-requests-settings
Site level settings

Allowing Specific Users to Share

As well as managing how users can share things, you can specify ‘who’ can share documents. If allowing all users of a site to share documents is a worry, you can define a SharePoint Security Group. You can then give people, in this group, permission to do the sharing. This can be a good way to control access to sensitive documents.

share-outside-organisation
Restricting by domain

You can even limit sharing to specific Office 365 domains. For example, if you are a school and need to share sensitive information with the county’s Children’s Services department, you can add the county’s tenancy to the list of accepted domains for a site collection. This prevents recipients from sharing documents any further.

advanced-settings
Advanced settings

Using SharePoint, it is easy to set up an Extranet for 1-1 collaboration with a partner company. People from 2 or more companies can work seamlessly without worrying about unauthorised people gaining access. This is done by creating a Site Collection just for collaboration with partners, and using domain sharing.

Assess the Risk

The key to all of this is to carefully look at what sort of files you are storing and what your business needs are. We like to look at this from a risk analysis point of view. The first principle is to enable people to do their work as easily as possible. You look at what loose controls look like, assess the risk of people abusing these controls versus the risk of people finding workarounds, and then tighten the controls appropriately. And remember, this is all from the starting point that most companies have of having effectively no control at all on who can email what to whom!

Other tools

By using SharePoint sharing settings wisely, you can go a long way to keeping your important information safe. It also allows users to do their jobs efficiently.

But there is some data that you will not want to leave the walls of your company in any circumstances. Even if External Sharing is off, a rogue employee can download a batch of files and put them on a USB drive, or email them to a personal account. You might be able to trace this after the event, but by then the damage would be done.

This is where Azure Rights Management comes in. When you apply Azure Rights Management to a document, it is encrypts it onto the server. This means that nobody can open it without validating against your Active Directory. You can still share it outside to named people. However, if the file does fall into the wrong hands accidentally, it simply won’t open. Also, if you decide you have lost control over who has access to a file, you can block all access. Another reason to block access would be if the information that it contains becomes out of date.

microsoft-rights-management
Microsoft rights management
free-office-365-consultation

Overall, like most things, external sharing has its ‘ayes and nays’. However, when done properly with the right tools, it can really improve the efficiency of a business. It also saves a LOT of time.

If you would like some expert advice from our consultants on how best to protect your organisation’s documents, give us a call on 02393 872561. Or, ping us a message via the chat box to arrange a free initial consultation. We’re here to help you!

Tags:Document Management External Sharing SharePoint Sharing
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn


Popular Posts
  • Microsoft 365 Updates: February 2021
  • PowerApps List Sorting
  • Managing Teams Groups: Preventing Chaos 
Recent Posts
  • Microsoft 365 Updates: February 2021
  • PowerApps List Sorting
  • Managing Teams Groups: Preventing Chaos 
  • What is Manage My Teams?
  • Counting Beyond your Delegation Limit in Powerapps

You may also like

microsoft-365-updates-february
February 22, 2021 News, Office 365 Monthly Updates

Microsoft 365 Updates: February 2021

Read more
powerapps-list-sorting
February 15, 2021 News, SharePoint

PowerApps List Sorting

Read more
teams-groups
February 8, 2021 News, Teams

Managing Teams Groups: Preventing Chaos 

Read more
About

AMT evolve is the trading name of

AMT Data Technologies Ltd

 

Registered Office:

One Port Way
Port View
Port Solent
Hampshire, PO6 4TY

Company Number: 04543988

Recent Posts
  • Microsoft 365 Updates: February 2021
  • PowerApps List Sorting
  • Managing Teams Groups: Preventing Chaos 
Latest news
  • Microsoft 365 Updates: February 2021
  • PowerApps List Sorting
  • Managing Teams Groups: Preventing Chaos 
  • What is Manage My Teams?
  • Counting Beyond your Delegation Limit in Powerapps
Additional links
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Partner with us
  • Quality, Data Protection and Security Polices
  • Privacy policy

security-icons

Accreditations

Microsoft Gold Partner

Gold Cloud Platform
Gold Devops
Gold Data Platform
Gold Data Analytics
Gold Enterprise Mobility Management
Gold Windows and Devices
Silver Collaboration and Content
Silver Application Development
Silver Small and Mid-Market Cloud Solutions

Copyright AMT Data Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.

Have a project? Let's talk.

Give us a call or leave a message, we get back to you as soon as we can.

0800 849 3018

enquiries@amtevolve.com




    Document Management Packs

    Some info to appear in my popup

    as

    das

    da

    sd

    a

    d