I understand that Sharepoint Online/Office365 provides full features for external document sharing? Providing options for direct emailed access and quick one-off "guest link's" (i.e. http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/office365-sharepoint-online-small-business-help/share-sites-or-documents-with-people-outside-your-organization-HA102894713.aspx)

So far as I can tell these same options are in no way available to Enterprise on premise Sharepoint 2013 deployments- is this correct?

This is a huge feature that we absolutely need to have. We were headed down a custom development route before we realized that everything we wanted already existed in SP2013- but seemingly not for on premise. What is the thinking here? Very frustrating. Combine this with the lack of support for Skydrive Pro for MacOSX and its enough to consider a Box/Huddle implementation. 

The ability to share with anyone is available in On-Premises Enterprise installations.  What isn't available is built-in integration with Windows Live to authenticate users.  IF you could share with external users there would be no way for them to authenticate to the On-Premises environment.  That is why it isn't implemented On-Premises.  If you create a Forms Based Authentication system (and add external users to the system) it would work just like it does in Office 365.

If you want to be able to share documents with anyone who has a Live ID (Just like Office 365), here is a way to do it

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff973117(v=office.14).aspx

Paul: That explanation makes sense, thanks. But it's still unclear why "Guest Link", which can apparently function anonymous, no SSO required, document access is not available with on premises. And I assume its safe to presume that even with the addition of Forms Based Authentication we won't have this functionality and the user and administrative GUI elements tied to External Sharing that SP Online has won't be available to us, correct?

Thank you for this link. Still seems that even with this implementation the GUI elements through SP 2013 won't be available to us as admins or to our users.

That's true about the guest link, but on the other hand Office 365 doesn't support anonymous access to anything other than the Public Web site.  So the Guest link is the only way to do anonymous sharing where in On-Premises you can share whole libraries or web sites.  Its different, not better or worse.

Hello

Im checking the link about how to "federate" external users, and seems ok for me. Only to know if you found a newer way to do it on premises, and also if you found a place where describe how to create tyhis magical GUI button of sharing

Thanks in advance

AvePoint Perimeter could make SharePoint On Premise external share easier without publishing SharePoint to internet and no need for complex federation setup.   It could be a fit for your requirements. You could see more information here: AvePoint Perimeter for Enterprise Mobility

• Edited by Pingzhong Li Monday, March 31, 2014 8:49 PM

I believe Microsoft have chosen to omit the Guest-Link feature as part of a larger strategy to slowly kill the On-Premise and Partner-Hosted service providers and force people to their cloud.

These guys have a 3rd party solution which address the problem:

http://www.itgsharepoint.com/Pages/externalshare.aspx

I found this solution online, which uses SharePoints build-in Forms-Based-Authentication. 

Have not yet tried it, but it looks pretty good.

https://sharepoint2013fba.codeplex.com/