As of 23 March 2018, Office 365, sharing settings will change slightly affecting how you can share resources (files, folders, sites, etc.) with external users.

As part of this update, external users will no longer be able to see content that has been Shared with Everyone, All Authenticated Users, or All Forms Users, even if they have been invited or added to authorised groups.

How will this affect you?
In SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, currently, you can share resources with external users by sending an invitation to the users directly, or adding them to groups and giving access. As a result, an external user would only see the content that has been shared with the user or with groups to which the user belongs.

After March 23, 2018, external users will no longer see content that has been shared with Everyone, All Authenticated Users, or All Forms Users. Content that has been allowed to these groups will, by default, be visible only to the users within your organisation.

The change in Office 365’s sharing settings is presumably aimed at locking down what organisations are sharing and is very likely related to the new data protection law – General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – which has been passed and will come into effect on 25 May 2018.

If you have any questions about the Office 365 update or would like to receive our GDPR information package, please follow this link — directionforward.com/introduction-to-gdpr — or you can also reach us at, [email protected].