With Microsoft SharePoint becoming more prominent in storing documents for collaboration and editing, we find a times we need to share links with external clients, vendors, or partners. Sometimes links are not shared properly leading to access issues with external contacts. This is a guide (or refresher) on how to create and share links from any documents within a Microsoft SharePoint site.
For our example, we've created this document that lives within Microsoft SharePoint called KO Social Brief.
We can see this document lives within a Microsoft SharePoint site here:
Once we have the document ready to share, you can either click the share button within the document (left picture) or hover over the document in the SharePoint site and click Share (right picture).
Here is where it might be trickey.
If you simply select "Copy Link" as is, it will grab the link that will only work for Hiebing folks.
If you are looking to share externally, you need to first specify the person in question.
Then verify that yes, this person is outside of the org
Then you can either add a message here and click send or now use the "Copy Link" here. By doing this action, you'll see that there are some little person icons in the lower left of this window. This indicates this document now has links for external folks:
You can copy the link and send it off to whomever.
You can verify this document has the proper link by selecting the "Manage Access" option next to Share in either the document itself or in SharePoint:
Here, click the links tab. You should see the new link you just created along with the person you've indicated can access the document externally:
When the external person receives the link, they'll need to prove themselves as the real intended person. They'll need to authenticate to get in.
They can proceed to verify they are who they are and access the document.
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If you encounter folks having issues with creating and sharing links, please reach out to Hiebing IT for assistance!