Highly dedicated portal for an external user or external company through which an M365 internal users can securely share files, content, projects, tasks etc. The external user instead of getting files through emails, can log into their portal and not only access these files and tasks but also upload files and seek approvals.
The Titan Workspace Client Portal is designed to provide your external users with a secure and dedicated platform for accessing documents and information around the clock. This guest access SharePoint portal is ideal for a wide range of external users like customers, vendors, Investors, contractors, frontline workers and various other external entities. These portals can adopt your company branding to give a highly professional experience to external users.
Titan Workspace eliminates the need for third-party solutions like Dropbox, ShareFile, or Box. By leveraging SharePoint Guest Access Permissions directly within your M365 tenant, you can securely manage external user collaboration without relying on external cloud services.
SharePoint makes it easy to share and monitor documents and files with external users, ensuring seamless collaboration.
You can set specific restrictions on files shared with external users, maintaining control over sensitive information.
SharePoint provides a secure environment for co-authoring documents, allowing multiple users to work on the same file simultaneously.
The built-in e-signature feature facilitates document approvals, streamlining workflows and ensuring authenticity.
External users do not need an M365 license to access shared files, making collaboration cost-effective and accessible.
Titan Workspace’s external user sharing portal can be tailored to either individual external users or entire external entities with multiple users, providing versatile and scalable collaboration solutions.
Vendors Portal for sharing Invoices, Purchase orders, Contracts, Policies
Customer Portal for sharing Purchases, Contracts, Invoices, status of requests
Contractor Portal for ontractors can update project status or tasks and managed their invoices and contracts
Investor Portal for Reports, Data rooms, Offer letters, contracts
Frontline Workers Portal for Documents, tasks, announcements, workflows
Student Portal for Course material, assignments, events
Yes, SharePoint and OneDrive are one of the best alternatives for replacing Dropbox or Citrix ShareFile for external client file-sharing. While OneDrive offers limited collaboration capabilities just restricted to file sharing from M365 users OneDrive account, SharePoint’s external sharing capabilities are far more extensive such as files, projects, tasks, signatures and content etc.
Ideal for creating a branded, secure client portal, vendor portal or gust user portal with seamless collaboration capabilities, SharePoint can provide better ease-of-use as compared to Dropbox.
M365 allows you to setup external users as guests in Entra ID (Azure AD) without any extra cost. Guest users can be configured with their Microsoft account or non-Microsoft account such as Gmail ID. Number of guest user’s concurrent basis depends on number of paid M365 licenses and this is depending on many factors such as use cases, features and Microsoft’s guest user management policies. You can setup MFA for external users as well.
External users (M365 guest users) can access SharePoint sites, files and participate in workflows with their Gmail account. Setting up guest users in M365 is a process that is managed by Entra ID administrators. If you setup a guest with their Gmail, then Microsoft has a highly secure authentication process built inside M365 that creates a shadow Microsoft account for every no-Microsoft user inside Entra. Guest do not have to worry about managing anything and neither are they supposed to share their Gmail passwords with anyone.
Yes, SharePoint allows you to create a branded client portal that can be accessed by external users (Guest User Portal). One can decide which sites or what features to be extended to guests. Most common use cases for client portals are collaborating with Customers, Vendors, Contractors, Investors, Students etc. and managing files share, tasks, projects, content, signatures, approvals.
There are two ways to share anything with external user. First one is without activating Entra B2B integration. In this case you can share files etc. but it does not allow you to share sites etc. Since this method does not create any Guest User Account in Entra ID, it offers restricted access to external users. The second method is by enabling Microsoft Entra B2B integration. This is done by creating a guest account and allowing external users to access SharePoint sites to collaborate for Files, Approvals, Projects, Tasks and content sharing. This method is controlled through Entra Id security and permissions setup through SharePoint such as full control, read only or mix of various granular level permissions.
What is required to set up a pilot for 50 external clients — steps, minimum licensing, and expected timeline?
Here is the step-by-step approach for setting up client portal for external users.
Step 1: Create a guest user in Entra. This would trigger an invitation for the Guest user. Guest will get a notification from Microsoft to accept invitation. Unless guest accepts invitation, it will no longer be activated as a user in Entra. If you want to add 50 users as guest, you have to do this step 50 times. This may cause inconvenience for your Entra Admin as this overburdens them with such a bid repetitive task. You can automate this by scripting. In case you want to track who all have not accepted the invitation, this is again a manual search in Entra. Sending a reminder to those who have not accepted the invitation is needed and is again a very tedious manual process.
Step 2: Once you see a Guest User created and active in Entra, you are all set to use that account for client portal.
Step 3:You need to create a SharePoint site (or an existing site) that will serve the purpose of client portal. This site must have all the information that you intend to have in a client portal. You can customize this layout to match with your branding.
Step 4: You must setup permission for the guest to be able to access this site. Like any other SharePoint site, you can setup granular level permissions to allow features and functionality accordingly with the guest users.
Step 5: Governance is the key here such as what are privileges for internal users, internal admins and external users making sure that it tested properly before extending these Guest User Portals to external users.
Titan Workspace offer end to end process right from managing guest users to managing client portals for SharePoint. Please visit https://titanworkspace.com/sharepoint-external-guest-user-portal.html
Yes, you can integrate all these. In fact extending a M365 based Guest User Portal that is integrated with your CRM or ERP could be deliver a better ROI than customizing these native applications which cost more money and time.
Titan Workspace has built a solution to overcomes all these challenges. https://titanworkspace.com/blog/Simplifying-External-User-Management-with-Titan-Workspace.html
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