How to create SharePoint site to store video files and provide access to external users as view permissions only?

Question

How to create SharePoint site to store video files and provide access to external users as view permissions only?

Answer 1

Hi @Vinod Survase,

Thank you for posting in this community.

1.Create a SharePoint site and create a Document Library to store video files.

2.Before adding an external user to the SharePoint Online site, ensure your SharePoint Online tenant is configured to allow external users – which is turned off by default.

• Go to the SharePoint Admin Center under Microsoft 365 admin center, Expand Policies, and then “Sharing”.
• In the “External Sharing”, make sure the “SharePoint” settings are not set to “Only people in your organization” (which means it’s accessible only to internal users). If it’s set to “Existing Guests”, you must invite an external user to your Azure AD before adding them to SharePoint Online. (The default for communication sites and classic sites is “Only people in your organization.” even though you set sharing at the organization level, and The default sharing setting for Microsoft 365 group-connected team sites is “New and existing guests.”). If you want to allow anonymous users, set it to “Anyone”.

Once you have confirmed the external sharing settings at the organizational level (Tenant level), the next step is to check if the external sharing is enabled at the individual site level by:

• Login to SharePoint Admin Center, Expand Sites >> Active Sites.
• Select the new created site from the list and click on the “Sharing” button in the ribbon. 
• In the Sharing panel, make sure the sharing level is not set to “Only People in your Organization” (which means, External sharing is disabled!).

3.There is a default read permission level in SharePoint Online, but this level allows users to download files, so we need to create a permission level based on the read permission level that removes the download permission.

• Please go to Gear->Site permissions->Advanced permission settings->Permission levels. Click Read->copy permission level.
• Enter the name of permission level (In my test, the name is view only) and uncheck "Open Items - View the source of documents with server-side file handlers." and save this permission levels.
• Go back to Advanced permission settings page->Grant permissions. Invite people and given them the permission level which you created.

4.In my test, the user "KarleyZZ" can only view the video but not download.

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Answer 2

I would recommend setting up the SharePoint permissions as follows:

• Administrators - All users needing the ability to create/edit pages and permissions
• Members - All users needing to add/upload videos
• Users - All users needing 'Read Only' permissions
  • Modify the permission level on this group to 'Read Only' access

You will need to create/use a library on the created site to store all the videos. Videos stored elsewhere will not be accessible unless the video is public (i.e. YouTube).