External Sharing Interview with the SharePoint Product Team
While attending the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas last month, Extranet User Manager president Peter Carson (@carsonpeter) was able to sit down with Mark Kashman and Stephen Rice from Microsoft to discuss some of the latest announcements and roadmap items around external sharing in SharePoint and OneDrive. Mark (@mkashman) is a Senior Product Manager, and Stephen is a Program Manager, both focusing on SharePoint and OneDrive. You can find the video of their discussion below.
As Mark explains at the start of the video, external sharing in SharePoint Online is "inviting people who aren't a part of your company into sharing content, (SharePoint) lists, PowerApps, you know…all the stuff you want to build. But it's really all about content: what it is you want to get from the vendor, from your partner, if you’re inviting clients to come into a space. They're not a part of your Office 365 tenant, so you want to invite them to…onto your environment."
"As you invite them to the site, you want to give them nice access and control, but limited to the scope of what it is that you're actually inviting them to. You're not inviting them to the whole tenant. You're inviting them to just the information that you want to share with them."
Peter asked Stephen to share some of the historical problems with inviting people outside of an organization: "When I joined the team five years ago, we had, like you said, a bunch of challenges around here. You had to have an Office 365 account, and if you didn't it was messy, to say the least, and people really struggled with it. So one of things we did is we introduced this one-time passcode experience where if you're not an Office 365 account user you just have to verify your identity. So if I share with, say, Peter at Envision IT dot com, all we do is make sure 'Hey, are you actually Peter at Envision IT dot com? Do you actually have access to that email account?' And then you can access that content, keeping it nice and secure, and in a much simpler experience."
Interviewer becomes interviewee, as Stephen asks Peter how Extranet User Manager fits into the external features Microsoft has in Office 365. Peter explains how EUM sits on top of what Microsoft has built to provide the governance and scale for larger Extranets with thousands of external users. Features like bulk import of users, self-registration, private registration links, approval workflows, and Flow integration all help provide that scalability. This is all built leveraging Office 365 and Azure AD B2B provided by Microsoft.
For more details, watch the video: