Share SharePoint document with external users in Power Automate

In this article, we will demonstrate how to share SharePoint documents with external users with help of Power Automate (Microsoft Flow). This approach works in SharePoint Online (Office 365).

Let us imagine the following use case: there is created a contract in a SharePoint library on our site and we want to send the document for a review to a customer (an external user).

We added an additional column Email to the documents library to store information about customers emails. We will use this information to send invitations to the clients. This is how our document library looks like:

Completed flow

We are going to create a flow that will simplify invitation process. To do it we click Flow, Create a flow:

Create a flow

Then we pick Complete a custom action for the selected item template in the list of template on the right:

Choosing a template

We proceed to Compling a custom action for the selected item and simply add to the flow Invite External User to SharePoint actions from Plumsail SP connector:

Completed flow

Adding the Plumsail action for the first time, you’ll be asked for a Connection name and Access Key.

New connection

You can type any name for the connection. For example, “Plumsail Actions”. Next create an API key on your Plumsail account page, copy, and paste it to the “Access Key” field.

We set up the Target field as Item, fill in the Library Name, pick ID variable from Get Items section on the right side to fill in the Item ID field and Email variable to fill in the Email Addresses field:

Email

The flow is ready. To start it on a particular document go to the library, select a document, click Flow, pick and run the flow:

Run flow on an item

Conclusion

That is it. These few simple steps can help you to ease communication with your clients.

Hint

You may also be interested in this article explaining how to share SharePoint sites with external users in Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) and Azure Logic Apps.