Forum Discussion
Introducing guest access for Office 365 Groups!
Today, we announced the new guest access feature for Office 365 Groups, the group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365. The new guest access feature gives you the ability to include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group.
- Get the details in https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/08/introducing-guest-access-for-office-365-groups/
- Learn more about collaborating outside the firewall with Office 365 Groups at https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/1362
- Check out the whole lineup of sessions on Office 365 Groups at Ignite https://sway.com/nPKQEFDoWdCin7eF!
65 Replies
Hi Kady,
Outlook 365 and Sharepoint are relatively new tools in our company and seems to have nicely useful features. I have started using the share point group feature for the past year (with my team members).
I have the following issue regarding groups:
I want to share some of our teamwork with other members of the organization, allowing those members limited privileges accessing certain folders and files within our group files.
I have searched the web, unfortunately, I did not find any solution for my criteria.
Does share point allow adding organization members as guests or limited access?
Thanks,
Zohar Shemesh
In Groups' jargon, "members" are users (internal or external to the organization) who are part of the Group and hence have access to all the Group resources.
On the other hand, you can share Group items (files or folders) with other users (internal or external) who are not members (i.e. not part of the Group), provided that the sharing configuration of the tenant and of the Group allows it.
If I add guest outside of organization which just uses gmail, its not working because he cant login using his gmail acocunt obivously. I do not understand this well probably. I can see that gmail user added as guest to my office 365 group recieving welcome email, and is part of Conversations, but as guest I cant use Planner, File, shared calendar and Onedrive for sharing files...
Do I need to add those guest access also in admin center somewhere or what??
Thanks Jaroslav Karlik for reaching out!
1. For external users to access resources, the user has to first redeem itself, which users can do through the View Files link in Welcome email, they will be redirected to the sign-up/sign-in page. Gmail users can create an Microsoft account through this sign-up process with login id as exactly same as their gmail-id, for e.g. bob@gmail.com can have Microsoft account as bob@gmail.com and use its Microsoft account credentials to login. This account can be used by Gmail user to access any shared resource with him in that tenant.
2. Guest access for planner is in the road-map.
By the way, the process to redeem an invitation (to essentially validate the guest user object created in AAD) is described in https://www.petri.com/external-access-office-365-groups. Just saying.
1. As a guest member, when you click Read group files link in your welcome email, you will be redirected to access the group files in SharePoint Online, in which you will have full control to view and edit group files, and also share group files to existing group members/guest members. But you will neither be able to add new guest user nor share groups files to new group members/guest members.
2. Guest access is not yet supported for Planner. Its coming soon.
3. Shared Calendar - When users in the group share a calender event, guest user can able to participate in. But cannot able to view full calendar events in the group.
You can refer this Getting Started blog which will help you on this.
http://www.jijitechnologies.com/blogs/new-guest-access-feature-for-office365-groups
- Many thanks for prompt response. Second point is most important for me. I want to use it for task management with a person outside of organization. Any idea when the guess access for Planner will be available?? So that I can plan around it...
Guess access became available over the weekend, after I'd struggled through the PowerShell steps - needed to install different versions of Azure AD moduleto get the commandlets so it would work - and it looks like it will be an answer to several collaboration issues.
But Groups bring new issues. I know, from following the threads on Groups that these issue will be resolving themselves over time, but here's what I'm seeing:
Navigation is clumsy. It seems that there's no direct way to get to the Group Team Site. One has to go to the group in OWA or OneDrive, That link brings you to either the mailbox or the documents library for the group. From the OneDrive/Library path one can then click Home and get to the Team Site. From OWA/Mailbox one has to click Files to get to the library and then Home to the Team Site.
Too many clicks!
It seems the Group Team Sites are otherwise hidden. There's no place to go from O365 SharePoint Online to see which sites exist.
I know that my users won't want to be bothered with all these steps and most of them won't (or can't without handholding) create bookmarks/favorites for navigation.
So, for me, navigation will be a critical aspect.
These direct links work for my group members - of course you don't have an invite so they won't work for you :-) so you need https://TENANTNAME.sharepoint.com/sites/GROUPNAME
Sharepoint team site for the group is: https://davidslight.sharepoint.com/sites/CAF/SitePages/Home.aspx
Document library for the group is: https://davidslight.sharepoint.com/sites/CAF
Discover and a directory of sites also works in Outlook client quite nicely try Browse Groups.
Would be nice if the Group Description field also was part of the Group listing ...
Thanks for the replies. Especially the assuarance that navigation is being looked at as an important update.
David, thanks for reminding me of the path statement. I may be able to get my users to understand. The users in question are salespersons for whom curiosity about and actually investing energy in using the software tools we have made available to them is severely limited.
For the sales people, if these links, such as https://TENANTNAME.sharepoint.com/sites/GROUPNAME, don't appear magically on the devices, they don't want to bother and will continue to use other, non-collaborative means.
OTOH, if I can get them to use Groups in Outlook, we might get somewhere :)
- cfiessinger
Microsoft
Barry thanks for the feedback, we are making a number of improvements around navigation and reducing the clicks, I'll be demoing a few at Ignite in two weeks (yes the recorded session will be made publically available shortly after) Thanks for your feedback.
You can now set the tenant level guest settings through Office 365 portal as well.
From the blog post: "Guest access works for any email accounts including corporate and consumer domains (such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com). If the guest email identity is associated with a Microsoft account (such as Office 365 or Outlook.com accounts, for instance), the user is directed to a sign-in page to identify themselves. If the guest doesn’t have a Microsoft account, they will be directed to a sign-up page to create an account."
Decoding it:
Guest access requires either an O365 account or an MS account. If a user does not already have one of these accounts, then he/she MUST sign-up for an MS account before being able to access a Group as a guest. As usual, it is possible to sign-up for an MSA using any email account, including corporate and consumer domains.
Correct?
Awesome news, gratz all for the milestone! We all know how many times it has been requested :)
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Reposting from the comments on the blog article:
The one part not clear to me is what kind of access they will get by default? And can we control that so we don’t end up with the “guest user deleted all the Group files” scenario?
The help articles indicate that this might be possible by controlling the settings template, however I cannot see any matching option.
Also, might be a good idea to update the help articles with the instructions on how to control Guest access per group (the 08d542b9-071f-4e16-94b0-74abb372e3d9 template).
- Will this take some hours or days to show up? Not seeing the Share section under Setting & privacy in Admin center yet ...
Yes it will take some time as we are rolling out the feature, in the mean time if you would like to access this settings you could do that via Azure Portal (http://manage.windowsazure.com) under Configure>User Access section - "Allow New Invitations".
IN AD CONFIGURE USER ACCESS, should Limit guest access be ON or OFF - seems it should be OFF?
