Sharing Office 365 files with people outside of your organization sometimes can seem to be hit or miss.

For a while now, we’ve been in a situation where a Office 365 user could share a OneDrive file with

• a known (existing) user,
• a new user with a Microsoft Account (MSA) (or a Work or School Account),  or
• an anonymous user.

the same user is able to share a SharePoint file with

• a known (existing) user,
• a new user with a Microsoft Account(MSA)  (or a Work of School Account)

See anything missing there? It has been a source of frustration for users when they want to share a file that is stored in SharePoint with a business partner that doesn’t have a MSA account.

You are in a very large group of Office 365 users if you are familiar with the workaround to this – copy the SharePoint file into your OneDrive and share the file from there.

At Microsoft Ignite 2017, last month, Microsoft announced that they would be shipping the missing ability – bringing the simplified sharing feature (No MSA Account Required) to SharePoint.

This feature has been on the Office 365 roadmap for just a little while, but it was hard to determine when it might be available for testing.

At the Office 365 Saturday Redmond event this morning (Oct 28, 2017), it was announced that this feature is rolling into tenants for First Release users at the end of October 2017, and should be in General Release by the end of 2017.

This is great news – I know that it will reduce the amount of training and documentation I get to help clients write about sharing files with external users. This will be a great addition to the Office 365 service catalog.

Additional Resources:

If you want a great primer on OneDrive sharing to share with your site users, be sure to take a look at The OneDrive Family Tree, from IcanSharePoint.com

Categories: External Sharing, O365 Roadmap, OneDrive, SharePoint Online