MVPs for SharePoint 2010: Office 365: SharePoint Online & Instant Extranets

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Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by SharePoint Server MVP Kris Wagner as part of the MVP Award Program Blog's "MVPs for SharePoint" series. Kris Wagner, SharePoint Server MVP, MCITP, MCTS is a Sr. business solutions architect for Synteractive. Kris focuses on cloud technologies, BI and designing solutions using SharePoint. Kris is an author, SharePoint evangelist, speaker, and blogger. Kris lives in Chicago and you can find him on his blog (www.sharepointkris.com) and on Twitter @sharepointkris.

SharePoint Online comes with several amazing features and here I’ll cover SharePoint’s Extranet feature. Office 365 and SharePoint Online now allows companies to truly collaborate with external users who are not apart the organization.

SharePoint Online enterprise customers can create instant extranets with none of the major cost considerations associated with traditional on permise solutions (hardware, secuity and consulting) . The extranet cababilies built into SharePoint Online will save your company money, that’s the bottom line here. SharePoint Online makes it simple to collaborate and share. 

External User Invitations:

First enable to External Users in the SharePoint Online Administration Center for the site collection you want to share, click “Manage Share By Email” and click “Allow” and the head over to your site collection. 

Open “Site Settings”, under “Site Collection Administration” click “Site collection features”. 

Find the “External user invitations” feature and click “Activate” to turn the feature on. 

Click “Site Actions” and then click “Share Site” (Invite new users to your site).

Add the new users email address to the Visitors or Members groups by typing it in, add a message and change the subject if you want and click “Share”. 

The next screen confirms you’ll be sharing access to the SharePoint Online site, click “Ok”.

Next the user receives an email invitation that looks like, asking them to accept their invitation. 

When the user clicks “Accept your Invitation!” they’ll surf to a sign in page and need to either use a Live/Hotmail account or use a Microsoft Online Services ID (if they have one).

Instant SharePoint Online Extranet with external user support for SharePoint Online, workflow and collaboration!   Line I said, SharePoint Online makes it simple to save money.