One of the benefits of SharePoint is the ability to share content easily – whether that is with internal or external entities. However, many organizations don't want to have wide-open sharing controls because they need to manage access to competitive information or trade secrets, have privacy information subject to laws (such as HIPAA), or have other information that they need to protect.

External sharing allows users in the organization to share content with users outside the organization. Whether you are sharing with users in your organization that belong to another Office 365 tenant subscription, customers, vendors, or partners, you'll want to include planning for guest and external access as part of your overall strategy.

In this chapter, we'll review the way external access works, as well as some of the sharing controls. By doing so, we'll cover the following topics:

• Planning and configuring guest sharing and site access
• Managing security options
• Assigning guest licenses