SharePoint Folder – External member

You’ve received an invitation link to a SharePoint folder from another organization. How do you accept?

SharePoint is (among other things) an online file sharing system. Typically, it is setup for members of an organization. It has security measures in place to protect the files from other users, especially those outside the organization. However, there will be times when a folder (and it’s contents) need to be shared with an external user. This article will walk you (as an external user) through the process of accepting the link and gaining access to a SharePoint folder.

Article Information:

Please feel free to share this and any other InfoLine article with colleagues, family and friends.

There are a couple of steps you have to go through to accept the invitation to the SharePoint folder, but you only have to do them once.

Receive an email invitation
You will receive an email invitation. Please click Open. Note: You can’t forward the email to another account. The link will only work through the account it was sent to.
Potential warning
You may receive a warning about a Suspicious link. You can safely ignore this warning and click Proceed. If you do not get this waning, just skip to the next step.
Request Verification Code
You are prompted to request a Verification Code. To do so, click Send Code. This will generate an email to be sent to your same email account with a code.
Verification Code prompt
After clicking the Send Code button, the page changes to prompt you to enter the Verification Code.
Check your email account for a new message with the Verification Code.
You will receive an email message containing the Verification Code. Note: that you have only 15 minutes to use this code before it expires. If it expires, you will need to go back to the previous step and generate a new Verification Code.
Enter the Verification Code
Enter the Verification code you received in your email account. Also click the Keep me signed in box.
View the folder
You will now be presented with the shared folder. You can drag and drop items into and out of this browser view to upload and download documents.
Access the folder later
To access the folder at a later date, you can either:
1. File away the email invitation (from Step 1 above) and click the Open link later when you need to access it again.
2. Drag the Lock icon from the browser window during step 7 to your desktop (or some other location). This will create a shortcut on your desktop you can click later to return to this page. In this image you can see the Lock icon that you need to click and drag to the desktop.