Forum Discussion
David Rosenthal
Microsoft
MicrosoftSharing to an external Office 365 Group
Came across an interesting scenario today and wanted to get this group's opinion (and perhaps yours cfiessinger) The relevant configuration items: We have external sharing requiring authenticati...
There's a specific Guest feature coming for Groups. Guests are invited and must confirm with matching account.
On http://fasttrack.microsoft.com/roadmap, searching for "guest", under In development:
"Guest access support will enable teams using Office 365 Groups to easily collaborate with external team members (members that are not part of their organization/tenant). Guest users will have access to all of the groups assets: inbox, files, calendar and notebook. We'll introduce a number of administration controls to help you manage guests in Groups."
There's a specific Guest feature coming for Groups. Guests are invited and must confirm with matching account.
On http://fasttrack.microsoft.com/roadmap, searching for "guest", under In development:
"Guest access support will enable teams using Office 365 Groups to easily collaborate with external team members (members that are not part of their organization/tenant). Guest users will have access to all of the groups assets: inbox, files, calendar and notebook. We'll introduce a number of administration controls to help you manage guests in Groups."
While investigating this topic, I came accross this Microsoft article that seems to indicate it is possible to share externally. Am I interpreting this incorrectly, or maybe the article is meant for the future release of the feature?
- cfiessinger
Eric while the documentation is live the features has not been rolled out yet but should imminently in early September, expect a blog post on the Office blog and a message center announcement within your tenant once the rollout starts so thanks for your patience and please stay tune.
- cfiessingerAnnounced today: Introducing guest access for Office 365 Groups https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/08/introducing-guest-access-for-office-365-groups/
- David Rosenthal
Thanks for all the replies everyone!
Really looking forward to the guest features coming to Office 365 Groups, but that isn't quite the use case I was referring to in the original post.
I want to share a file via the Office 365 external sharing mechanism with an external Office 365 Group - A Group that exists in a completely separate tenant. I want to do this to take advantage of automated permissions based on Group membership, as well as all the collaboration features that come with the sharing mechanism in Office 365 (co-authoring, version control, permissions control, etc etc) as compared to simply attaching a file to an email.
I understand all the technical reasons why this doesn't work currently, but as more and more separate companies that may be partners onboard to Office 365 this could become a powerful feature to help ease EXTERNAL collaboration with dynamic groups of people instead of just individuals.
I see. You want to keep the file in your tenant and share to people in another tenant by specifying only a Group that is controlled by the other tenant. If that tenant changes the Group's membership, you want the updated list of members to be who can access the file in your tenant.
The Guests feature will let you put the file in a Group in your tenant and specifically list individuals (by email address) in the other tenant. If the list of people in the other tenant changes, you have to edit the membership in your Group.
Or, the Guests feature will also let the other tenant create a Group and add you as the guest. Then you can add the file to their Group and they can change the Group's membership (and thus permissions to the file). You still have an independent copy of the file in your tenant.
Does either Guest scenario work for you? I can get feedback to the engineering team if you need the summary of what I think you're asking.
The interesting thing is whether an external group can be a guest user in the way that an individual is. As I understand the situation, a guest user is identified by an email address. An Office 365 Group in an external tenant has an email address. Therefore, it should be possible to create a guest user to point to that Office 365 Group and share with them. Wouldn't that solve the problem?
TR
- But we are talking here about "Groups guest"..is this a feature that you are thinking about it?
