As a SharePoint Consultant, I Hate to Say this, but There are Times When I Recommend BOX and Egnyte, Instead of SharePoint.

Many of my clients are startups and verging on going public.  They need to share files, usually pdf files, with partners and investors.  The same content can be shared with everyone, but the following three requirements are hard and fast:

1. Partners and Investors should not be able to download or print the documents.
2. No external users should be able to see who any of the other users are.
3. Sharing with content needs to be easy for the the sharing company as well as the viewers.

 

Partners and Investors should not be able to download or print the documents & No external users should be able to see who any of the other users are.

Until recently O365 SharePoint Online would not permit users to share pdf files and prohibit the viewers from downloading and printing the documents.  This feature is now supported and to accomplish this guest users must be given SharePoint permissions of "Restricted View."   The picture below shows that I have invited two of my own external email accounts as "Restricted View."

 

The image below shows what my experience was like when I look at a file that cannot be downloaded.  One can see that my other accounts appear as participants and if I hover over these icons, you can see my external email addresses.

The next image shows that I am able to view my resume and I cannot download or print it.  It also shows that I can see all the particpants,

Sharing with content needs to be easy for the the sharing company as well as the viewers

The biggest reason I support using Box and Egnyte for sharing content with external partners is that Microsoft still has not gotten the Sharing Content With External Users to be easy.  Often it works right-away, but frequently I have had to intervene and work with  the invitees.  Now mind you, I have been writing about this issue since 2015.  See my post from June 2015:

Office 365 External Users: Microsoft, Please Improve!

Today's external user issues tend to be two primary issues:

1. The most common reason people have trouble accessing a SharePoint site as guest, is because their browser is logged in to a different O365 tenant.  This is easy to fix by launching a private (incognito browsers window) or properly logging out of the browser before trying to access our SharePoint site.
   
   
2. Users used to have a Microsoft account "[email protected]", because they did not have an O365 account.  More recently their company has signed up for an O365 account and they are know with their Organizational Account: "[email protected]" 
   When people log in, they are usually asked which account they want to use, but they often get it wrong.

Bottom line is that I have seen far to many executives, investors and partners get frustrated with the Microsoft login issues.  It is high time that Microsoft fix these issues once and for all.  In the meantime, neither Box nor Egnyte suffer from these issues.  So there are time when I recommend that companies use Box and Egnyte to share files with partners.  By-the-way, I have heard good things about Google Drive as well.