The sweet spot for using SharePoint site designs and site scripts..

Disclaimer: This post is written based on the current functionality being rolled out, and might not be applicable in the future as the functionality evolves.

….is currently Communication Sites.

Read on if you feel like it :)

Enable external sharing on Communication sites

By default when you create a Communication site, external sharing has been disabled. As Communication sites are not listed in the site collection admin UI you need to turn to code or PowerShell to fix this.

I’m using PnP PowerShell where you enable external sharing using the following code:

# Connect to admin site
Connect-PnPOnline https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com

# Enable external sharing. Possible values are:
# ExistingExternalUserSharingOnly
# ExternalUserAndGuestSharing
# ExternalUserSharingOnly
# Disabled

Set-PnPTenantSite -Url https://contoso.sharepoint.com/teams/Communication201 -Sharing ExternalUserSharingOnly

Similar code for SPO commandlets would be, where we also allow anonymous sharing of documents:

# Connect to admin site
Connect-SPOService -Url https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com

Set-SPOSite -Identity https://contoso.sharepoint.com/teams/Communication201 -SharingCapability ExternalUserAndGuestSharing

I chose to use ExternalUserSharingOnly as you cannot share the full site anonymously, only documents, and sharing documents anonymously from a Communication site might not be the most obvious scenario.

Note: You have to ensure that the sharing settings on your tenant allows the sharing capability you are setting for the site.

The next step is to invite your external users. If you try to share using the Share site button in the UI, this won’t allow adding an external user (per writing this post).


The Share button is disabled for external users.


Instead navigate to Site permissions and hit the advanced permissions settings link. Or tack /_layouts/15/user.aspx at the end of the URL of your site. This is the old SharePoint permission page where you can hit the Grant Permissions button, and fill in your external user. Be sure to check off the email invitation and pick which access level the user should have. I’m adding my external user as a visitor in this example.



When clicking the site link in the invitation e-mail my external user is now added to the site and can browse around. Notice that as an external user you get blue/black suite bar, as the tenant theme won’t show for external users.



Happy sharing!

How to list all Communication sites in your tenant

The unique identifier for a Communication site is the web template used, and the name of the template for Communication sites is SITEPAGEPUBLISHING.

With this piece of information there are a couple of options you can use to find all the sites.

The first is to iterate over all site collections, and filter on the web template property, the other is to use search.

To list all sites you can use the SPO Management Shell, CSOM tenant API, or hope my PR at PnP PowerShell get’s accepted (https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-PowerShell/pull/998)

Basically the CSOM code looks something like this:

SPOSitePropertiesEnumerableFilter filter = new SPOSitePropertiesEnumerableFilter()
{
    IncludePersonalSite = PersonalSiteFilter.UseServerDefault,
    StartIndex = null,
    IncludeDetail = true,
    Template = "SITEPAGEPUBLISHING#0",
    Filter = null
};

var list = Tenant.GetSitePropertiesFromSharePointByFilters(filter);

Using the SharePoint Online Management Shell do this:

Connect-SPOService https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com
Get-SPOSite -Template SITEPAGEPUBLISHING#0 -Limit ALL

With the PR accepted you would be able to use PnP Posh with the following command to list all Communication sites much like the management shell:

Connect-PnPOnline https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com
Get-PnPTenantSite -WebTemplate SITEPAGEPUBLISHING#0

If you want to use search, you can use the Submit-PnPSearchQuery commandlet.

Submit-PnPSearchQuery -Query "webtemplate=SITEPAGEPUBLISHING" -All -RelevantResults

This approach is of course available for other templates as well. Happy iteration!