In this article I will show you how to allow anonymous sharing of folders and documents from Teams created by School Data Sync. This article will only cover the actual SharePoint permissions, for more information about sharing please read my initial post Anonymous guest sharing in Teams.

From the Docs we can learn that School Data Sync (SDS) is a free service in Office 365 for Education that reads the school and roster data from a school’s Student Information System (SIS). It creates Office 365 Groups for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, class teams for Microsoft Teams and OneNote Class notebooks among other things.

Large schools and districts can save a lot of time using School Data Sync to automate the creation of teams, user accounts, teams membership, licensing etc. Just imagine creating class teams and adding memberships in a district with thousands of students and teachers, then imagine repeating that during every summer break… SDS can be a complex tool, luckily Microsoft also offer free one-to-one deployment support.

As I explained in the first part of this two part part series, default SharingCapability of the underlying SharePoint site is ExternalUserSharingOnly, not ExternalUserAndGuestSharing which is what is needed for anonymous sharing (sharing with users without an Azure AD account).

As previously shown we can easily change the SharingCapability of a single site, but to change in bulk all those created with School Data Sync, based on data from your Student Information System, we need to create a simple PowerShell script.

First up we need to save our admin credentials to a variable and connect to SharePoint Online PowerShell:

$Cred = Get-Credential

Connect-SPOService -Url https://tenantname-admin.sharepoint.com -Credential $Cred

Now we need to find all the SharePoint sites belonging to teams created by School Data Sync, first lets capture all sites in a variable:

$sites = Get-SPOSite -Limit All

School Data Sync will create teams based on what Microsoft refer to as Sections. A section could be a class, course or some other type of logical group in your SIS, and it will allways have a unique identifier that will be part of the URL of the underlying Sharepoint site. It would typically look like this:

https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/Section_131408225065301513

At this point we have a variable containing all SharePoint sites, lets separate out those belonging to a team created by School Data Sync by filtering on the URL with a pipe to Where-Object:

$SDSSites = $sites | ? {$_.Url -like "https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/Section_*" }

You can easily establish the total amount of SharePoint sites created by School Data Sync using the Count method.

$SDSSites.Count

Now that we have a variable containing the relevant SharePoint site objects, let’s summarize this whole excercise into a script to allow anonymous sharing in bulk:

# store admin credentials in a variable
$Cred = Get-Credential

# Connect to SharePoint Online PowerShell
Connect-SPOService -Url https://tenantname-admin.sharepoint.com -Credential $Cred

# store all SharePoint sites in a variable
$sites = Get-SPOSite -Limit All

# extract SharePoint sites created by SDS
$SDSSites = $sites | ? {$_.Url -like "https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/Section_*" }

# set SharingCapability to ExternalUserAndGuestSharing

foreach($site in $SDSSites){

Set-SPOSite -Identity $site.Url -SharingCapability ExternalUserAndGuestSharing

}

Set-SPOSite is quite slow, depending on how many teams were created by SDS, this script can take hours to finish. Consider adding a progress counter using Write-Progress if $SDSSites.Count returns more than 100 sites.

When the script is finished you should be able to share anonymously from all teams created by SDS. Remember to repeat the process whenever new teams are added via your SIS (typically during winter and/or summer break).

To kick-start this blog I would like to show you how to share folders or documents, like the weekly schedule, homework etc., with anonymous guests like parents.

For the sake of clarity, these are not guests invited to the actual team, but rather anyone receiving or accessing the link, by email, a text message or from a webpage.

Unfortunately for our use case, when a team is created, the underlying SharePoint site has a default SharingCapability of ExternalUserSharingOnly. We can find the SharingCapability by logging onto Sharepoint Online with PowerShell, as an admin user with the appropriate permissions:

Connect-SPOService
Get-SPOSite -Identity siteurl | select SharingCapability

SharingCapability : ExternalUserSharingOnly

We can see in the docs that ExternalUserSharingOnly allows external user sharing (share by email), but not guest link sharing.

What we need is ExternalUserAndGuestSharing, where both external user sharing, and guest link sharing are enabled; Let’s see how we can acomplish that using powershell.

First, we need to establish the site url. There are several ways to get the URL, but as an end user we can find it by navigating to the team’s general channel and the files tab, then choose open in SharePoint. A browser window will open with a long URL, where you will need to extract everything including what comes immediately after /sites/. The rest of the URL can safely be ignored.

The URL should look like this: https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/teamname
(teamname at the end of the URL is not the displayname, but what is called mailnickname in Azure AD)

Let’s store the URL in a variable for later use:

$siteurl = https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/teamname

The same information is accessible with Exchange Online powershell, you can easily while logged on get a list of Groups and their SharePointSiteUrl with the following command:

Get-UnifiedGroup | select DisplayName, Alias, SharePointSiteURL

Then all we need to do is change the SharingCapability property:

Set-SPOSite -Identity $siteurl -SharingCapability ExternalUserAndGuestSharing

To be sure let’s check the SharingCapability one last time:

Get-SPOSite -identity $siteurl | select SharingCapability

SharingCapability : ExternalUserAndGuestSharing

Now you can choose a folder or document whithin the team’s SharePoint site and share with Anyone. In this setting you would most likely also want to disallow editing. Once you hit Apply you can copy the link and distribute it as you choose. Happy sharing!

Stay tuned for more on this, in a later article I will show you how to do this in bulk for teams generated by School Data Sync, and maybe all SharePoint sites belonging to Class, PLC or Staff teams.