Share your SharePoint sites with external users using CSOM

Yesterday on the Office 365 Yammer Network, someone asked if it was possible to add external users to a group using CSOM.

After a quick research, I found that it was a recurrent question and there’s no clear answer to that question. So I decided to investigate and I found the answer 🙂

In CSOM, there’s a namespace called Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Sharing in which there are two useful classes called WebSharingManager and DocumentSharingManager.

These two classes are used to share a site or a document with users (internal or external).

In my case, I want to share a site with an external user so I need to use WebSharingManager.

This class has a method called UpdateWebSharingInformation with the following signature :

public static IList<UserSharingResult> UpdateWebSharingInformation(
  ClientRuntimeContext context,
  Web web,
  IList<UserRoleAssignment> userRoleAssignments,
  bool sendServerManagedNotification,
  string customMessage,
  bool additivePermission,
  bool allowExternalSharing
)

As you can see, there are many parameters which are very easy to understand but the important parts are userRoleAssignments and allowExternalSharing.

The first is a collection of users with whom you want to share the resource. The second is to enable external sharing if the users are not employed by your company.

How to use it in practice ? It’s very easy.

using(var password = new SecureString())
{
  foreach(var c in "myPassword".ToCharArray())
    password.AppendChar(c);

  using(var ctx = new ClientContext("https://tenant.sharepoint.com/"))
  {
    ctx.Credentials = new SharePointOnlineCredentials("user@tenant.onmicrosoft.com", password);

    var users = new List<UserRoleAssignment>();
    users.Add(new UserRoleAssignment()
    {
      UserId = "username@externaldomain.com",
      Role = Role.View
    });

    WebSharingManager.UpdateWebSharingInformation(ctx, ctx.Web, users, true, null, true, true);
    ctx.ExecuteQuery();
  }
}

When you execute the code above, the external user is invited as a viewer in the site associated to the CSOM context. He will receive an email to access to the site.

If you want to know if the invitation was sent successfully and if the user has accepted (or not), you just have to go to Access requests and invitations through the site settings.

If you want more information about WebSharingManager and DocumentSharingManager, just go to the official documentation on MSDN.

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15 thoughts on “Share your SharePoint sites with external users using CSOM”

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Marvin December 28, 2015 at 5:00 PM

hi can you please provide a working powershell example thanks!

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Sooraj January 4, 2016 at 3:32 PM

Can we Accept the request through code ?

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Ketan August 10, 2016 at 6:59 PM

Thanks for the post, hey do you know if there is a REST API for doing the same? We would like to do it thru SPD Worflow by calling the REST API (service) to add/share with external user.

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reshmee011 September 7, 2016 at 4:04 PM

Unfortunately that method WebSharingManager.UpdateWebSharingInformation is only available to use via CSOM or JSOM.
Below is a blog post explaining why the method can’t be used in REST, this is because it is expecting the parameter ‘web’
http://sharepointfieldnotes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/whats-new-in-sharepoint-2016-remote-api.html

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ankul September 12, 2016 at 7:10 AM

can we share documents by this code ?

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haohuancheng December 4, 2017 at 1:18 PM

i also want to do.

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larry angama (@larry_angama) June 27, 2017 at 10:29 AM

The WebSharingManager class don’t seems to be present in Microsoft.SharePoint.Client download via nuget, any one have the same problem ?

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Stéphane Cordonnier (@s_cordonnier) Post authorJune 28, 2017 at 7:58 AM

This article was written 2 years ago… Maybe the class has been deprecated and removed since that date.

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Kev Maitland August 17, 2017 at 11:21 AM

It’s in Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Sharing 🙂

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