Sharepoint external sharing issue

Question

My team has recently been placed on share point as we collaborate a lot with external companies. The sharing function was one of the reasons our company chose to move over however recently our external users have been unable to see the full contents of the folders we have shared with them. 

 For example, we’ve recently been using our folder to share the content for our next issue of our company Magazine. We have given access rights (with edit) to our designers at an external company. They are able to access the folders most of the time, but sometimes they are not able to see all the files within (for example, in some cases they were able to see Word docs but not images). They were also not able to upload files to the folders themselves (despite being invited with ‘edit’ access) – which meant we had to resort back to email for sharing large PDFs and then have to upload them ourselves.

Any ideas on how to resolve this issue?

Answer 1

Hi Nicole Kerr,

I feel sorry the frustration it caused and would like to help.

Before started, I'd explain we suggest our customers post one issue in each thread, so that our support engineers can help to further investigate a specific issue and provide corresponding assistance. This will also benefit community members when they search answers based on the title, let's focus on your first issue that external users can’t see some files sometimes within a specific folder shared with them.

First, you can check if the file is checked out or not. Because when the file is checked out, other users can’t view or edit the files. To check that, you can refer to Check out or check in files in a document library. Or the file needs more time to finish the uploading while user want to access.

Second, you can go to Library Settings-> Versioning Settings-> Draft Item Security,****see which item you checked.

In the meantime, another possible cause can be the specific item permission. Because we can set individual file permission not to inherit its folder permission, and users can only see items they are allowed to access. To check specific item permission, you can select the item > click the “!” icon on the top right of the page > Manage access > Advanced > check permissions > input the specific external user account having the issue > check whether he has the correct permission. If you see “Delete unique permissions” button on the top left of the tool bar, that means this specific item has separate permission from folder permission, which means the item is not inheriting the folder permission.

If the information above doesn’t resolve the problem, please provide us more information below for further investigation:

1.       Does the issue affect specific external users or all external users?

2.       Does the issue happen to specific files or specific file types? Or does the issue happen to random files?

3.       Does the problematic file inherit its folder permission? Does the user have the right permission to the problematic file?

For your second issue that external users can’t upload files with edit permission, I suggest you to check the permission level in the Site Permission->Advanced permissions settings->Permission Levels->Edit to see if “add item” option is unchecked or not. User cannot upload files if “add item” is unchecked.

If my suggestions don’t work, I recommend you can open a new thread and provide error information so that our other members and support engineers can give helpful suggestions to resolve this problem.

Best Regards,

Ivy

Answer 2

Hi Nicole Kerr，

Have you checked my reply above？ For any concerns, please come back and share with us. 

Regards，

Ivy