Recently, one of my SharePoint consulting services clients faced an error while trying to share a file with an external user (Gmail user). The error says: Your organization’s policies don’t allow you to share with these users. Go to External Sharing in the Office 365 admin center to enable it.

This is a very common error for users working with classic SharePoint Online sites, especially when trying to share the site pages with an external user via their Gmail account.

The latest SharePoint admin center changed a few steps, so I thought I would update the tutorial.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to fix the error step by step with detailed information.

Your Organization’s Policies Don’t Allow You To Share With These Users

Before showing you the steps to fix the error, let me tell you how I received the error.

• Open the SharePoint site and navigate to the library/list from where you want to share the document or item. Here, I am using the default Site Pages document library. Then, select the specific site page that you want to share -> click on the Share icon.

• This will open the Share dialog box. In this box, provide the external user’s email address and click on the Share button.

• Now, you can see the exact error message.

The funny part is that Microsoft is still showing the message as the Office 365 admin center instead of the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Reason

If you want to share a document or item with an external user, the external sharing option should be enabled at the tenant or site level. If it is disabled on these levels, an error will occur.

When external sharing is turned off at either the tenant or site level, if we try to share SharePoint information like SharePoint site, site pages, list, list items, document library, files or folders, or give site permissions to external users, an error will be generated.

Enable External Sharing in SharePoint Online

To fix the “Your organization’s policies don’t allow you to share with these users” error, you need to enable external sharing at the organization and SharePoint site levels.

Enable External Sharing for SharePoint at Tenant Level

First, you need to enable external sharing at the SharePoint tenant level. Make sure you have permission for this.

Here are the steps:

1. Log in to SharePoint admin center by https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com (or) Login to Microsoft 365 admin center -> Select SharePoint admin center.

2. On the left navigation window, expand Policies -> Select Sharing option. In the Sharing window, drag the External sharing option of SharePoint to ‘Anyone. ‘ Then, click on the Save button at the bottom of the page. The screenshot below is provided for your reference.

This is how you can enable external sharing at the tenant level.

Enable External Sharing at SharePoint Site level

Next, you need to enable external sharing for the particular SharePoint site level.

To enable external sharing at the site level, follow the steps below:

1. Open the SharePoint admin center. Then, on the left navigation pane, expand Sites -> Select Active sites.

2. Select the SharePoint site where you want to share content with an external user. Then, click on the “Sharing” option in the command bar, as shown in the screenshot below.

3. In the Sharing window, select the “New and existing guests” option -> click on the Save button.

This is done now. You enabled the external sharing at the site level also.

Once you enable external sharing at the tenant and site levels, try to share the document or item. You will no longer see that error.

Look at the screenshot below:

You can see from the image below that the site page is successfully shared to an external user:

If you follow the above steps correctly, you will not receive the error: Your organization’s policies don’t allow you to share with these users. Go to External Sharing in the Office 365 admin center to enable it.

Do let me know in the comment below if this solution helps you.

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Bijay Kumar

After working for more than 18 years in Microsoft technologies like SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI), I thought will share my SharePoint expertise knowledge with the world. Our audiences are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. For my expertise knowledge and SharePoint tutorials, Microsoft has been awarded a Microsoft SharePoint MVP (12 times). I have also worked in companies like HP, TCS, KPIT, etc.