Forum Discussion
Existing external users no longer found in company directory
Four days after removing the user from sharepoint and deleting them from the AAD recycle bin, this user now has access.
The solution was to withrdaw and resend their invitation two or three times a day for four days, and then without any change in process, or indication of any changes from Microsoft, an invitation finally worked.
If anyone from Microsoft is reading this - the process for sharing with external users, how accounts are broken when a firm adopts Office 365, the steps for removing and reinviting external users who had access, and lost it... this whole process is terrible, a drain on our help desk resources, and a constant black eye for collaboration using Microsoft products.
Also - my apologies if I sound upset. This issue coupled with the inability for users to create MSA accounts even when their company doesn't appear to be using Office 365 / AAD has flooded my inbox over the last week - and I have no answers on how to allow my project teams to share their sites with external users.
Looping in Eugene Lin who is our SME and can parse what you're attempting with how the service is designed for external sharing. Eugene?
I am borrowing this thread as we are experiencing similar issues, and would like to get help to it. Maybe Eugene Lin?
Our issue: SPO site/library has been shared with external user with email user1@email.com. External user has signed-in using MS account with the same email address as user name. Then after some time when user tries to sign-in again with that user account, he/she gets error "user not in directory".
It's slightly different scenario than described in this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3026478/error-message-when-an-external-user-accepts-a-sharepoint-online-invita , which is for situations where invite to SPO has been sent to user1@email.com and user has used another MS-account user2@email.com to sign-in and redeem the invitation.
The error message "user not in directory" will occur with an existing external user when their company adopts Office 365 or Azure AD. The first time they try to access your already shared resource with their account after their company adpots, they will be trying to sign in with an Org account (not a their old microsoft account).
The solution is the same as the KB article that you posted. Clear them out of the sharepoint site, delete their old MS account from the directory, and clear them out of the AAD recycle bin.
Also pray you don't have thousands of external users whose company's are slowly adopting AAD & Office 365 because it is going to be a manual process for ever single one of them. Meanwhile Microsoft is going to ignore any comments about how their login/identity solution is frustrating you, your users, and the external users they are trying to collaborate with while they hand you this old KB article and claim it fixes your problem.
- I opened support case with MS support (#6168939) but the problem with this issue is that I don't believe there is a KB article for this yet ;)
MS Support is referring to the same article which I linked in prev post, but I would like to understand the root cause for our clients and customers with whom we do business.
