To share Google Drive files with people who do not have Wellesley domain accounts, you have a few options that are explained below.
To see if you need to follow these options, you can try sharing the Drive file with their email address. Google will automatically check to see if that email address has a Google Account. If they do have a Google Account, Google will share the document with them and you will not receive any error message. If they does not have a Google Account, you will receive a popup error message with a list of email addresses that do not have Google Accounts. At that point you have the following options:
- Ask the recipient if they have a Google Account, and send it to that address instead.
- Ask the recipient to create a Google Account, which they can create with their non-Google email address.
- They can do so at this link: https://accounts.google.com/signupwithoutgmail
- They can do so at this link: https://accounts.google.com/signupwithoutgmail
- Set the sharing permissions on the file to Anyone with the link, but see the caution notes below.
- This option is strongly discouraged.
- You lose control over who specifically has access to the files.
- The link can be shared with anyone. Once you send the link to the recipient, they could forward it on to anyone, they could publish it on a website and it could end up in Google Search results, etc.