Step 1: How to View/Review the current Site Collection Settings
1) Go to SharePoint Admin Center (Where you manage site collection). In SharePoint you can simply append –admin to your URL. For example if your URL is https://xrmlabsSP.sharepoint.com the admin center URL will be https://xrmlabsSP-admin.sharepoint.com
2) Select the site collection you want to inspect.
3) Select Sharing in the ribbon
4) This will launch the following dialog which will show current setting
5) There are couple of options to choose from
a. Option 1: One now allowing sharing outside organization
b. Option 2: Allowing external Sharing but only to those who have been setup as office external user. This will happen when you import users from another organization (external company) who has its own office or Azure AD.
c. Option 3: Allow users who have accepted sharing invitations.
d. Option 4: Allow members to Share links to site content to be accessible using anonymous access link. This is something we do not recommend as it poses manageability issue.
Step 2: How to View/Review the current Access Request Settings
For doing so do the following
1) Login to your SharePoint
2) Click on the view icon on the top right corner
3) Click Site Settings
4) Under User and Permission click on Site Permission
5) In the Ribbon on the top click Permission and then click Access Request Settings as shown below
6) This will launch a dialog which will look something like below
7) The “Allow members to share the site and individual files and folders” Allow member of this site to share individual file and folder to other which may include internal or external users. In our experience this is a big security risk as you lose track of who is sharing what to whom. Until you do not have a very strong reason you should not enable this setting.
8) “Allow members to invite others to the site members group”. This setting allows members to share this site with other users. Here as well the site can be shared with internal (within your organization) or externally (with people who are outside your organization). This setting allows users to share the entire site rather than individual documents or folder. You should be careful with this setting as the invite is to share the site not just one document or folder. However this is more manageable than the first option which allows user to share files or folder. Our recommendation would be to keep this option disabled until you do not want to allow users to share the contents.
9) “Allow access request”: This allows users to request access to this site if they do not have access to this site already. This allows you as administrator to set who will receive these request. User will be allows access to this site only when someone approves his access request. There are additional setting which allows you (admin) to set message that will be shown when someone comes to your site and wants to request access.
Example: When this setting is enabled the user of this site will see this message “you need permission to access this site”
