Forum Discussion
five issues with one Office 365 Group
I have five issues with an Office 365 Group. I've been trying to work on them with Microsoft for about 4 weeks now and, unfortunately, I've only stumbled into more problems, rather than resolving any issues. I have two support tickets open with Microsoft support at the moment.
Importantly, I don't seem to have these issues with a test group I created for comparison purposes. The issues only seem to occur with this group.
Below is a summary of the five issues that I'm currently facing with this group.
- Invites to some external users sometimes never arrive even though they're added to the group. I've seen others posts on this issue, but I haven't seen an explanation as to why that happens and what the fix is. I have no resolution other than to remove and re-add them, and hope they get the email this time.
- Invited external users sometimes aren't granted SharePoint access after they click the "Read Group Files" message in the welcome email. I've seen others with this issue on the forum, and it looks like a permission syncing issue between Groups and SharePoint. Regardless, it's a bad user experience if they accept the invitation and then have to request access to the Team Site document library via the web browser and wait for that permission to be granted by an administrator. Or, they can close their browser, wait a while, try again, and find it magically work.
- External users who are succesfully able to access the Team SharePoint site are suddenly unable to do so. It seems like their permissions were removed, even though they remain listed as a user through PowerShell. I have to remove and re-add them to the Group.
- External users are unable to search the document library. The "Highlighted Content" web part also doesn't work for them. This was the inital issue I discovered and there's been no resolution at this point.
- I can't manage the group from Outlook 2016. See the screenshot below. A web search for part of that error in quotes has no results so I suspect this is an unusual problem.
Have any of you seen this issue before?
I am building a private group in Office 365 Outlook. I can add Office 365 users just fine, and I've been able to add many guest members (using email addresses outside the domain).
But, for a couple of the guest email addresses, when I hit "Save", I get the error "The group can't be saved now. Please try again later."
This only happens with a couple specific email addresses, I know this as I was able to add 20 other "guest" users with email addresses outside of the group domain. I've also tried to add these same email addresses to other groups, and I get the same error.
for the two email addresses I am trying to add, they are from different domains and formatted differently. One is fname.lname@xxxx-xx.com the other is flllll@xxxx.com.
Any help would be appreciated...r/ChuckNick, did you ever receive an actual answer on this?
- Invites to some external users sometimes never arrive even though they're added to the group. I've seen others posts on this issue, but I haven't seen an explanation as to why that happens and what the fix is. I have no resolution other than to remove and re-add them, and hope they get the email this time.
Created a couple of groups today with external guests and some received invite and most didn't.
All settings at the Tenant, OneDrive and SharePoint are set for external access.
Sahil AroraMicrosoft
Can you PM me the details such as
1. Tenant name, Group name.
2. Guest email address & failed to get mail, also approx time when they were added.
I will revert back to you. Ideally guest should receive welcome email unless Group created from MS teams or Welcome email is disabled.
>Invited external users sometimes aren't granted SharePoint access after they click the "Read Group Files" message in the welcome email. I've seen others with this issue on the forum, and it looks like a permission syncing issue between Groups and SharePoint
This isn't restricted to external users - I've seen it with internal users. They get the welcome email but whilst they can see the documents that have been sent via the conversation, they can't access the SharePoint library.
Just had it this second with myself. I'm a global administrator so added myself to a group where a user has raised a ticket. Got the welcome email but still get access denied on trying to open the SharePoint document library.
I've a) found this post and b) written this reply but still can't access the document library. That's 5 minutes so far.
- Sahil Arora
Thanks Nick for reaching out! Sorry to hear that.
- For #1, How did you create Groups, through Microsoft Teams? During preview groups that were created via Teams werent sending invitiation emails. This issue is resolved in GA version. Also did you check whether they received email in spam?
- For#2 It usually takes 15mins to 1 hour for permission to sync, once it is done the guest would be able to access file seamlessly.
- For #3 Can you share the error screen-shot that they are facing? through Private message
- For #5 this seems to be some issue with OLK desktop. Let me follow up on that.
Sorry about the delay. I wrote a reply right away. I came back to check in with you and saw that my reply was missing. Anyhow, let me try again.
1. I created the group using the new "Create Site" option on SharePoint. We do not use Teams. The invite emails were not in the users' spam folders.
2. Are you saying the design expects conditions where a user might get an invite via email to join a Team Site before s/he is given permission to do so? That can't be right. How can I add users to the SharePoint Team Site manually after I add them to the Office 365 Group since the sync seems to be intermittent/broken? How can I check to make sure they’re in the SharePoint Team Site permission group after they’ve been added to the Office 365 Group? The command I was told to use through the SharePoint Power Shell (Get-SPOExternalUser -Filter) is insufficient, because I’ve seen users listed there who do not have access to the Team SharePoint site.
3. Below is the error from the latest user to have this issue (blurred the private info). The email address in the error is a member of the Office 365 Group.
4. Sounds good. I have had an open ticket on that issue for over a week, but have not received any substantive help yet.
Just wanted to make sure anyone following this thread is aware that none of these issues have been resolved yet. I have two open tickets with Office 365 support (opening the first in February) and have been unable to resolve any problem reported at the start of this topic.
Please let me know what else you need from me.
1. I created the group through SharePoint "create site" to create a modern Team Site. Yes, people checked their spam folders, and no they did not receive invites.
2. Am I understanding you correctly in that an email could go out to a user before the sync is complete? Sounds like an odd race condition. It opens up the possibility for users to be denied access to the document library, which is what some of my exeternal users have experienced.
3. Here's an example:
We're sorry, but XX@XX.com can't be found in the XX.sharepoint.com directory. Please try again later, while we try to automatically fix this for you.
4. Ok.
- David Rosenthal
We see these same issues a lot, and I put a very detailed outline of it in this other thread: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/Groups-Guest-access-and-SharePoint-access/m-p/49679#M2342
Still waiting for a reply from Sahil Arora *nudge nudge* :)
- Sahil Arora
Sorry for delayed response, this got missed from my radar. Just replied...
Thanks for this. All the (SharePoint and Office 365) admin settings allow for external sharing. For many external users, they seem to be granted access as expected. Also, I did not make any changes via PowerShell. What I did do was setup permissions for the document library and SharePoint pages to allow the Group to read and edit content as I saw fit, relying only on the Group (rather than the individual external users) when setting up the permissions.
What I've seen is that the user experience is inconsistent as I've documented above. Some of these issues, (1), (2), and (3) may be common to others and be a backend problem related to syncing and maintaining permissions between Groups and SharePoint. I also think the issues I mentioned about search and controlling the group from Outlook (issue 4 and 5) indicate I have issues unique to this Group and Team site, since these issues aren't appearing with other Groups on my tenant.
On issues 1-3, I'm hoping there's a workaround people have identified because I'm adding lots of external users and I'd like them to have a consistent and predictable experience!
On issues 4 and 5, I think this Group is uniquely messed up somehow, and I haven't been able to get the help I need to identify the source of these issues. I was hoping someone may have experienced these unusual problems too and figured out how to fix them.
