Forum Discussion
Cannot add a "contact" in Exchange Online to an Office 365 Group as a Guest
Thanks George Khalil for reaching out! Currently adding of mail contacts as guest is not supported, however there is way you can add mail contacts for which you would need the administrator to remove the other mail-enabled object, after which the guest user object can be added by the group owner or by an administrator running cmdlet with mSExchHideFromAddressLists property as $false, this property would ensure that the contact is visible in GAL.
You can refer tenant admin documentation https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Guest-access-to-Office-365-groups-Admin-Help-7c713d74-a144-4eab-92e7-d50df526ff96?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
Alternatively there is a very good and informative article written by TonyRedmond https://www.petri.com/external-access-office-365-groups about guests in Groups, which includes details about Guests in Groups.
Microsoft now has an Office 365 Roadmap item to allow a mail contact to be added as an external guest to an Office 365 group. It's coming... (like Christmas!)
Hi Tony, Thanks for the reply and great to know! Any ideas on garnering a soft target date of 'rolling out' status on this? I believe 'first half of 2017' was mentioned earlier in the thread.
Cheers!
It is "under development" so could be revealed to First Release tenants at any time. I think this is a reasonably simple change, so I would expect it in the short term.
- My customer has had the situation for over a year. Where they had all business partners as mail contact objects in AD. Which means we cannot use them as guests in 365 at all. So for the moment they are paying K1 licenses and managing separate accounts for those we need access to SPO on 365. Very costly since externals do not need access that often.
