Anyone with the link option is greyed out even when the settings are enabled at the organization (SharePoint Admin) level.

Hi Sophia,

Thanks for your response. I can confirm that External Sharing for active users is enabled as follows.

Also, the tenant level allows External Sharing with Anyone with the link. I have limited sharing by members of a specific security group only, and I am a member of that group.

I just think something is still outstanding somewhere

Dear Bryan,

Good day!!

Apologies for the inconvenience caused and please don’t worry, let’s work together on your concern and move towards a resolution path.

I understand your concern and to my knowledge, if you have set the Sharing to Anyone at the Tenant level (as below), the Anyone with this link will be enabled for all users in your Office 365 organization on their OneDrive for Business, unless you disable the external sharing for the user, to confirm follow the below:

Open the Microsoft 365 admin center> Active Users> Click on the User> OneDrive> Manage external sharing> Sharing is disabled:

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If the above option “Let people outside your organization access your site” is disabled, please enable and click on the Save.

If the option is already enabled, I would like to confirm whether the sharing settings are set to the following in the SharePoint Online admin center:

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Note: If the Sharing options are not set to Anyone (reverted back without your intervention), please make sure to set it to Anyone and scroll down the page for clicking on the Save button. After clicking on Save button, please click on the refresh button to see whether the changes are applied.

If yes, can you please check whether you have enabled the option “**Allow only users in specific security groups to share externally”**under the More external sharing settings? If yes, that could be the possible reason why the users in your organization are seeing the Anyone option as grayed out and only the users who are part of security or mail-enabled security group which was added at the option “Allow only users in specific security groups to share externally” can shared with Anyone. Reference: Allow only members in specific security groups to share SharePoint and OneDrive files and folders externally - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

However, if the above option mentioned is not enabled, Sharing is set to Anyone at both tenant level and site level, then I would like to confirm whether the users in the SharePoint Online site are seeing the Anyone option has grayed out only when sharing Folders? If yes, then I believe the problem is caused due to the Limited-access user permission lockdown modesite collection feature is activated and request you to follow the below steps:

Open the SharePoint Online Site> Settings> Site Information> View all site settings> Site Collection Feature> Scroll down and deactivate the feature Limited-access user permission lockdown mode.

If none of them matches to your situation, we apologize and request you to share some screenshots of your problem with screenshots of sharing settings at the tenant level and site level, so that we can better understand and guide you further.

Appreciate your patience and understanding. Have a great day!!

Best Regards,

Sophia

I think I was finally able to figure things out! Sophia's detailed guide earlier helped me to take another crack on the issue. ☺

Although the permissions were set correctly everywhere, the little devil was on me setting the "Can share with" option for the allowed security group to 'Authenticated guests only" instead of "Anyone". My preferences were to allow for tenant-wide External sharing abilities, but at the same time restrict sharing by only a specific group of admins. However, I wanted external users to be able to access shared content without having to sign in to the tenant.

I fixed this issue as highlighted in the following screenshot.