In this post we look at examples where external sharing settings for SharePoint sites differ from the organization-level policy and the reasons why.

Intro

Global and SharePoint admins have the ability to set organization-level sharing settings for SharePoint and OneDrive that control who content can be shared with via the SharePoint admin center. These organization-level policies control what guests must do to access the site/content, plus set additional file/ folder link sharing settings.

These settings should apply by default to all sites created within your SharePoint environment…but they don’t. Read on to find out why and understand what you can do.

The issue

I recently observed that when creating new SharePoint sites, either via the self-service user creation method or in the SharePoint admin center that I am unable to share the site, or it’s contents with external guests. I started by checking the organization-level settings within my tenancy to make sure nothing was awry and that proved to be correct as it was set to anyone.

However, I took a peek at the external file sharing setting at the site level and noticed that it was set to only people in your organization – not the organization-level default. Note: I hadn’t made this change myself to the site after the fact, this was the default set when the site was created.

The reason

Why is this the case? Well irrespective of what organizational-level sharing policies you set for SharePoint sites, each site type has their own default setting that overrides this:

Site type	Default sharing setting
Classic	Only people in your organization
OneDrive	Anyone
Group-connected sites (including Teams)	New and existing guests if the Microsoft 365 Groups setting Let group owners add people outside the organization to groups is On; otherwise Existing guests only
Communication	Only people in your organization
Modern sites with no group (#STS3 TeamSite)	Only people in your organization

Note: The root communication site (tenant-name.sharepoint.com) has a default sharing setting of Anyone.

So the reason my site was set to only people in your organization was because I had created a communication site.

Now, it’s quite possible I’ve missed this information, but it’s definitely news to me.

How to change the external file sharing settings on a per site basis

So, now you know that your organization-level settings may not be reflected in the sites you create based on their type, you may want to change them. Here’s how to change an individual site basis:

• Open the SharePoint admin center > search and select the site you wish to change
• Select the settings tab > open the external file sharing drop-down list
• Select the relevant external file sharing option > Press Save

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