Can't enable external sharing in Office 365 tenant

Question

I am trying to enable external sharing in SharePoint online. It was already sharing with external people, I tried to troubleshoot few issues, so I turned it off, then I tried to turn it on again, but now I am getting this error message:

"You can’t set the sharing capability to the level you specified, because it is a less restrictive setting than either its parent site collection or your organization."

I am doing this by going to the SharePoint admin center, then policies and clicking on "Sharing". I drag the sliders to "New and existing guests", for both SharePoint and OneDrive, then when I click OK, it gives me this error. This only happened when I turned off the external sharing and turned it on again.

This happened to me on 2 different tenants, is there something wrong am doing or is it a bug?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I have done a test in my SharePoint online and I can reproduce your issue. This only happened when I turned off the external sharing and turned it on again from new SharePoint admin center.

i solved the issue by navigating to classic SharePoint admin center->Sharing->Choose "Allow users to invite and share with authenticated external users"->ok.

Then you can drag the sliders to "New and existing guests", for both SharePoint and OneDrive from new SharePoint admin center.

Answer 2

You can change that in the Office 365 admin center.

1. Go to https://admin.microsoft.com/
2. Under Settings - Security & privacy
3. Then Sharing, click Edit
4. If not On, turn that on
5. Click Site Settings (To change your external sharing settings for SharePoint, you need to go to Site Settings)
6. On that side pane, change to the External Sharing level you want.

When you go back to SharePoint Admin Center you will be able to change that again.