Having consistent problems with a folder dropping external users

Question

I am a small business owner and use OneDrive for all our files. I have a project with a lot of external members. I created a Team within the admin panel and within that team I wish to have two levels of access. I added two folders and added the users as guests to those folders then shared the link with "people you specify can edit".

I set it up over a year ago and it was mostly stable, but then people started to lose access periodically, and I would just re-add them. But in the past month, it has become completely unstable, with people using a link for one day then it not working the next day with a variety of errors including that their email address is not known or that the folder is gone. I'm also working with an IT person and he has turned off the expiration deadlines, and we have checked all other settings. And like I said, it was working for a long time!

We tried replacing the two folders and resharing the new folders, but still having problems. Weird things, like a link from my Explorer not working, but link from online Sharepoint working for one person. Another person both work.

My thought is we maybe need to create two separate teams and then add the external users through the admin panel as guest users?

Help please! I am losing my mind and this is wasting so much time!

Nicki

Answer 1

Hi @Nicki Pozos

If you need to share files with external users, you don't need to add them as guest users and create two teams.

You can create two shared channels in your team, which allow you to share files with external users without adding them as guest users.

Each shared channel has its own SharePoint site. The separate site is to ensure access to shared channel files is restricted to only members of the shared channel.

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