Teams and Microsoft 365 Sharing - Unstructured and Structured

Teams and Microsoft 365 external sharing is all about publishing or collaborating with people outside your organization. Users will find ways to do it with or without IT support (typically through email or shadow IT), so it's important for IT to provide an easy way for them to do it effectively and securely.

Sharing can be done in a number of different ways.  Unstructured sharing to a small set of external users works well with the OOTB SharePoint and OneDrive features.  External users can also be invited in as full Microsoft Teams guests for collaboration. Teams Shared Channels can be used to improve the user experience for external users, eliminating the need for tenant switching in Teams.

As the scale increases, structured sharing with many external users needs alternatives such as Azure AD B2B, custom code or third party solutions.  We'll discuss options available and what makes sense where using real world examples.

In this session we will cover both configuring sharing appropriately, and the user experience for both content sharers and recipients.  We'll go through a number of different scenarios.

  • External sharing in Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint Online
  • Azure AD B2B (Business to Business)
  • Teams Shared Channels and Azure AD Direct Connect
  • Microsoft's Entitlement Management portal's Access Packages for external users
  • Custom and third party options leveraging the Graph API

We'll also touch on how to leverage Microsoft's security stack to improve the security of your Microsoft 365 Extranet.


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