Page 133 - MS Office 365 for Dummies 3rd Ed (2019)

FIGURE 8-2:
The SharePoint Online Admin Center.
Turning on external sharing
If you anticipate that any of your site collections or business units that use Share- Point Online have a need for external sharing, the first step as a SharePoint Online Administrator is to turn on external sharing. By turning on this feature (if it was not already on by default), users outside of your organization can be invited to SharePoint Online. This one-time action enables the site collection administrators to grant external access to their individual sites without going through the Share- Point Online administrator.
Enabling external sharing turns on the feature for all existing and future sites within the site collection for which you activate it. This does not, however, mean that all your SharePoint sites are now publicly accessible. The site collection admin- istrator has to grant someone outside of the company access to a SharePoint site.
Microsoft is constantly fiddling with the user interface for Office 365. As of 2019 you can turn on a preview for the new SharePoint Online Admin Center. You will find it in the upper part of your screen with a button that says “Try the preview.” If you don’t see that button, you might already be in the new portal. The proce- dures we outline will be the same, but the interfaces will look different. If you do decide to try the preview, then be warned — Microsoft changes it constantly based on customer feedback. If you are open to trying it and giving feedback to make the product better, then it is a great way to learn and influence the future!
To enable external sharing for a site collection, follow these steps:
1. ClicktheSharePointlinkintheAdminCenternodeintheOffice365 Admin Center.
The SharePoint Online Admin Center screen appears.
CHAPTER 8 Demystifying SharePoint Online Administration 117