Forum Discussion
Sharepoint exteranl sharing
Hi all,
I have a customer that has 300 users and they only have 100 SharePoint licenses. We develop intranet on one of their site collection (Just a random web pages without any workflows or automation). I have enabled external sharing for other 200 users using "Allow sharing only with the external users that already exist in your organization". I have created the users on the cloud without license then I shared the site collection with the users that i have created. For doing that i have successfully enable all the users to access the site collection. I have couple of question regarding this.
1. Is there any license compliance issues based on what i did?
2. When do i need an SharePoint licenses?
Thank You.
You are violating the license requirements, see https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-external-sharing-for-your-SharePoint-Online-environment-C8A462EB-0723-4B0B-8D0A-70FEAFE4BE85?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US for the details, the following statement from that page makes it quite clear:
- External users are not employees, contractors, or onsite agents for either you or your affiliates.
9 Replies
You are violating the license requirements, see https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-external-sharing-for-your-SharePoint-Online-environment-C8A462EB-0723-4B0B-8D0A-70FEAFE4BE85?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US for the details, the following statement from that page makes it quite clear:
- External users are not employees, contractors, or onsite agents for either you or your affiliates.
- Hi Dean,
Thanks for your response and it's now pity much clear for me regarding the compliance issue with Microsoft licenses.- Please, tell us how you finally managed this situation with your customer
- I think the scenario is quite clear :-)...your customer is not correctly licensed and Dean's link and definition of what a External user means is quite clear...also Salvatore's and Nuno's comments are very valuable for you
- Hi Juan,
Thanks for clearing things up.
Thank You
- My 2 cents here:
1.- Your customer is not compliant with Microsoft license requirements since they have only licenses for 100 users, but they have 300 users
2.- You need a license for every corporate user (living in your AD) that is going to access to SPO- Thanks for the quick reply. I have some clarification.
1. So as a example if that organization wants to leverage the SharePoint services for specific division that has 100 users instead of buying license for that specific division they need to buy license for all the users (300)?
2. My question is at what point of time do I need SharePoint license for users? Because enabling access to the external users now I can use most of the functionality of the SharePoint without license.Juan is correct:
- In an organization, all internal users (i.e. belonging to that organization) that actually access internal SPO resources must have a license.
- External users, instead, don't need a license. But they must be external, i.e. not belonging to the organization.
As you have found, such license requirements are not enforced.
Nevertheless, you must fulfill it.
