While using an on-premise environment, no out of the box method is possible to share the SharePoint content with the users outside the domain. You could use the content web app, configure forms authentication and then ask your developer set up an ASP.NET page to handle the credentials for the Forms Web Application. Whatever method you adopt for this, you are going to require a decent amount of human effort to set up and maintain.
As an IT director, you should establish policies on external sharing, where content areas or data types are allowed to be shared externally and who should audit the external permission.
2. Avoid network share with OneDrive for Business
OneDrive for Business is the simplest cloud storage for your staff. Anyone who has access to a personal site(earlier known as My Sites) can access OneDrive for Business, with a 1TB personal storage quota. Moreover, OneDrive storage quota of each user does not count against your overall SharePoint online storage quota.
OneDrive for Business provides employees with a personal site, where they can share, sync and collaborate on documents with people inside and outside the organization and access their content from a large number of devices. OneDrive for Business can be integrated with Office products and can also be synced into Windows Explorer for a familiar experience.
Being an IT director with a network share for your users and you are looking to return that pesky network share, OneDrive for business could be your solution.
3. Receive New SharePoint Updates and Features First- Choose to be more stable
Earlier Microsoft has released a SharePoint version every 4-5 years with new features and functionalities. With SharePoint Online and Office 365 which use a rolling release model, the big chunk approach has been eliminated. Rolling releases means new versions, features and improvements, are continually released to SharePoint Online customers regularly, free of charge and without any installation or use of the application.
Microsoft has done a brilliant job of communicating through the Office 365 admin portal when the updates are scheduled, and we ‘ve experienced no significant issues from any of the updates. Essentially moving towards, new SharePoint online features and functions are released first and then applied to on-premise environment sometime in the future. If you are furious to see what all new features are in the queue, Microsoft has recently published an Office 365 roadmap, a living document which is updated frequently and lets to know completely what is coming down the lane. You can also choose to enable the preview features which gets you early access to new features that have limited support, allowing you to be on the bleeding edge of SharePoint.
4. You can access SharePoint Online anywhere
By performing a SharePoint Migration, your users are no longer limited to a single device or a single network. Imagine a world where you can access your email, contacts, docs, from any place using any browser with an internet connection.
Not having a laptop 24/7 is no more an issue, you can log on to Outlook Web Access to retrieve your emails to grab the required documents before your meeting in Skype for business. Maybe you are traveling, and you have the only intermittent internet connection, you can sync your contents to the Windows Explorer from the SharePoint Online so that whatever changes you have made while offline will be uploaded back to SharePoint Online once you are reconnected to the internet. This adds to the benefits of SharePoint Online and Office 365 that any place in this world is your workspace.
To know more about how to Migrate SharePoint from One Tenant to Another or to Migrate Dropbox to SharePoint visit Apps4Rent.
