Allowing external users by domain instead of individually

Question

I have a SharePoint Online site I administer for my company. The business users want to grant access to their site to external users from a variety of small professional architect companies (usually 5-10 employees in each, but about 40 companies.)

Most of the companies have their own email domains, such as jsmith@smallarch.com. Instead of maintaining a list of 200-400 individuals that come and go, how can I grant access to anyone in the company? In short, instead of allowing jsmith@smallarch.com, I want to allow anyone from smallarch.com to have access.

Answer 1

There is no white listing functionality that exists in SharePoint Online like that. Your option would be to Allow both external users who accept sharing invitations and anonymous guest links or individually manage access.

I would rather do the latter. It isn't too much effort to add external users as necessary. My best practice is to create a new group on your site called External Users and invite/add them to that group. This way you know exactly who has external access to your site and you can easily remove them.

Answer 2

The way we proceed here is this : we have a few Sharepoint portals for various projects and so we need to share data with external users. We create PALs and give access to the needed Sharepoint portal, and it's mostly a generic account for each external company. I don't know if that's the right way to do, but that's how we manage at the moment.