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Sylvain Chopard's avatar
Sylvain Chopard
Copper Contributor
Dec 29, 2018

O365 external sharing

Dear all,

 

A customer with M365 E3 license with SPO and EXO deployed is looking for a secure solution to  collaborate between internal business units and external customers (work on documents and share ideas in a secure place).   

Sharing Sharepoint online site collections with external accounts should address the business need. As for security I would stick with either of these options: 

- invitations to guest users limited to site owner only (can be reinforced with external domains inclusion/exclusion )

- global admin managed guest users (guest users must be in AAD). More restrictive but requires global admin involvement.

 

I noticed that when authenticated as external user on a shared SPO site, when trying to search for People or Everything on the site, I get the "You need permission" page, which is fine, but when trying to Request for Access it throws error:

The specified user i:0#.f|membership|<user email address>#ext#@<tenant> could not be found.

Is this expected behavior knowing that this account exists in O365 admin/users ?

 

Separately are there any O365 apps in the E3 subscription that would benefit external collaboration (Skype, Yammer) ?  And what would be the effort to implement them ?

 

Thank you for your feedback.

office 365
sharepoint
    • Sylvain Chopard's avatar
      Sylvain Chopard
      Copper Contributor
      Dec 29, 2018

      Thanks Adam. 

      I'm not yet that familiar with Teams and given the customer is not using it to this point, it would require a fair amount of training before being used effectively.  It would however be an area to explore with customer to benefit from its integrated communication capabilities (chat, voice, video).

      For this specific case I feel that collaboration is going to be more project focused so SPO should do fine.

      I'm also not quite sure yet as to how granular security can be set in Teams vs Sharepoint site/apps/files 

      For testing purposes I did create a Team site but I can't add a guest account directly from within Teams even after having turned on guest access in O365 Teams Admin center (org wide settings). I was able to add the guest user from the admin center but the user is still not showing as a member in Teams site. Anything I miss ?

      • adam deltinger's avatar
        adam deltinger
        MVP
        Dec 30, 2018
        How/where did you add the user?
        Guests should be enabled both for teams and for groups
        Groups: admin portal - services and addins - groups
        Teams - teams and Skype admin portal - guests

        After enabling this, it can take some time to propagate!
        Also if you added a member already through any other service than teams like directly to the office 365 group and not from teams, it can take some time as well to show in teams

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