Sharing content with non-group members
Documents, discussions, questions, and uploaded files in a private group can be shared with the users who are not members of the group. This is useful if you need a non-group member to help you review and edit a document or discussion.
Content sharing options
Non-member content sharing must be allowed for the group. The group owner or community administrator may need to enable this feature for you, depending on how your community is set up. For more information, see Enabling non-member content sharing.
With the feature enabled, you can share documents, discussions, questions, and uploaded files (when they are stored within the group). Besides, you can choose both community members and people outside of the community as recipients.
A content item can be shared as follows:
- PDF export: The selected content item is converted to PDF with comments included and sent by
email.
- Co-authoring: The selected content item is made accessible to a community user for viewing
and editing. The user effectively becomes a co-author of the content item.
How you can share a content item depends on whether you can edit this item or not.
| If you are... | And the recipient is... | |
|---|---|---|
| a community member but not a group member | not a community member | |
| Group member and cannot edit the content item |
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| Group member and can edit the content item |
|
|
| Group owner and cannot edit the content item |
|
|
| Group owner and can edit the content item |
|
|
| Community administrator with the Manage Social Group permissions |
|
|
| Community administrator with the Full Access permissions |
|
|
Note that in groups, documents and files can be co-authored by all group members, and both methods can be used for sharing. But questions and discussions can be co-authored only by their authors, other group members can share them only as PDFs.
Sharing with non-group members
To share a document or discussion with a non-group member:
You can see a green bar at the bottom of the screen letting you know the share was successful. You can also see an orange icon at the top that lets you know the item is visible to non-group members. You can click the provided link to see which non-group members the content item has been shared with.