Our ‘IT Needs of Active Research survey‘ highlighted a common request from researchers to share documents with people outside the University and we are pleased to announce that ‘Anyone Links’ are now available in Microsoft 365. ‘Anyone Links’ are for public facing information and data in OneDrive and SharePoint, and allow you to share documents with people outside the University e.g. a talk for a Conference. IT Services have provided some useful information below on how to use the new feature.
OneDrive
As a OneDrive user, you now have the power to choose your audience and control who sees your content. You can create different types of sharing links, such as:
- Anyone (with the link)
- People in the organisation
- People with existing access
- People you choose (including external contacts)
You can also review and manage your shared links effortlessly within OneDrive. Get started by checking out our user-friendly guide in the Knowledge Base article KB16556.
Remember, before sharing with “Anyone,” you should carefully consider whether the content is suitable for public use. If your documents contain personal, protected, or sensitive information, this would be considered a data breach if it was found to be publicly available.
Example use cases for “Anyone” links include:
- Published research outcome data
- QR code links for sharing slides and other data in conference presentation
- Information for prospective students about UoB
Any documents containing sensitive, personal, or protected data, or documents that should not be publicly available should be shared using the ‘People you choose’ option, as only those specified people will be able to access the link.
SharePoint
If you want to publicly share information from an existing University SharePoint site using the ‘Anyone’ links, you’ll just need to make a request to add the ‘Anyone’ sharing level for your site via the IT Service Portal.
Learn more about external sharing in SharePoint by visiting our Knowledge Base article KB16556.