Doug Owens
Director of Implementation
If your agency’s work involves sharing documents or collaborating directly with other law enforcement agencies, community groups, partners, etc., then you may want to use the external sharing features of SmartForce™ to share content securely with people outside your organization who do not have licenses for your SmartForce™ and Microsoft Cloud subscription. Sharing information securely and in real time are powerful ways to improve communication, coordination, and results.
In this article we explore external sharing in detail.
What are the external sharing features?
External sharing features include:
The ability to turn external sharing on or off globally for an entire environment (or tenant). Turning external sharing off at the tenant level means no documents or sites can be shared externally.
The ability to turn external sharing on or off for individual sites. This provides you with the ability to secure content on specific sites that you do not want to be shared and allow access to certain sites you do want to share with external partners.
The ability to share sites and documents with authenticated users. Authenticated users are those who your agency invites to sign in by using either a “Microsoft” account or a “Work or School” account. We will explore this topic in more detail later.
What is an authenticated user?
An authenticated external user is someone outside of your organization who can access your SmartForce™ solution, but does not have a license for your SharePoint Online or Microsoft Office 365 subscription. External users are not employees, contractors, or onsite agents. They are outside agencies or community groups that need to have a user name and password to access your solution. Key examples of authenticated users are; Principals and Vice Principals of Schools, District Attorneys, Crime Analysts from local police or sheriff’s offices, Presidents of Homowners Associations, Managers of Hotels, Retail Business Owners in a key business park, etc.
How do you give an authenticated user access?
With Office 365 or SharePoint Online
When agencies have Office 365 or SharePoint Online, turning on external sharing is done with a few clicks of the security functionality by your SmartForce™ administrator.
To illustrate this example, let’s say that three agencies all have SmartForce™ and they are running it on Office 365 Government. These three agencies can select to share an Auto Theft Investigations or Regional SWAT site among themselves using their current Microsoft e-mail addresses so they will all have access to these two said sites to collaborate together.
Without Office 365 or SharePoint Online already in place
In this case, the user needs to “Cloud Enable” their email address. This can be done with a Microsoft Passport account such as an outlook account which can be associated with a .GOV account and clients can use the .GOV account to authenticate. The Microsoft Passport account is used to cloud enable the user. You can associate any email address to a Microsoft account.
To illustrate this example, if your agency is running a School Resource Officer or School Safety Program, you will be able to give external, secure access to school principals or vice principals that “Cloud Enable” their email addresses so they can share documents, photos, and discussions between themselves and school resource officers.
With Active Directory Services for Integration
Azure Active Directory is an option for Organization to Organization or Agency to Agency (or B2B as in Business to Business). If your agency has Azure Active Directory there is no cost to use the service and more details on how to implement the authentication is linked below. With this model, you can use SmartForce™ on Office 365 and or Azure and provide external authentication and access.
A Final Note on Security
The SmartForce™ Agency Management System contains the most robust security features of any law enforcement solution on the market today. Whether you are wanting to share information in a CJIS compliant environment with internal or external users, we can help you set up the proper permissions to fit your particular agency’s needs. Contact us at 303-800-5042 and one of our law enforcement specialists will be happy to answer any additional agency specific questions regarding external sharing, authentication, or security.
References:
Manage external sharing for your SharePoint Online environment
Office 365 Government Community Cloud
B2B and B2C services for integration points
