Forum Discussion
External Access - Microsoft Account Creation
Has anyone seen anything recently where external users cannot create Microsoft accounts with their work email addresses? How in the world is external sharing supposed to work if they cannot do that and they are not Office 365 customers? We would have no idea what address to send the invite to and you're asking business users to create a completely personal account to access business content from your organization? Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly. I hope I'm not, but if this is the case external sharing in Office 365 just become worthless, unless you're only working with other Office 365 customers.
Sending secure links, it is not necessary to have a Microsoft account.
Yes, but it is required if you want to share the entire site. This may very well be a good solution for us not perfect, but has still not yet hit our tenant and I have no idea when it will.
AFAIK, Secure Links have already been launched for all tenants.
cc StephenRice
- Microsoft disabled the ability to create Microsoft accounts from a work e-mail address more than two years ago: https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-finally-blocking-users-creating-microsoft-account-work-email-address/
What you could do for this external users is to create guest users in your tenant for them...this is something possible and you could even create secondary Azure Ad for those purpsesWhy would I have so many external users with work email addresses in my admin portal? They weren't all created more than 2 years ago. It's totally unsustainable to create external IDs for each external user. IT would be a huge bottleneck. Maybe it has been like this all along as I don't have another work address to test with. I typically send to some test gmail accounts I have. I just don't even know what the workflow would be to give an external user access to an Office 365 group now if they aren't on Office 365.
- because your guest user that gets setup in AAD goes by the address that you specify, the actual Microsoft account used gets tied to that AAD account when they log in the first time using a Microsoft account accessing a shared resource in your tenant.
So you send a SharePoint invite out to external user@hiscompany.com he get's the e-mail and tries to access. He logs in with his user@outlook.com microsoft account. That account gets added into your tenant as user@hiscompany.com even thou he logged in with the outlook.com account. But it now knows to associate that account with that user when they login to that account to access your tenant resources.
- You don't have to send to their MIcrosoft account e-mail address, you can input any e-mail address, when they use the link they can then use an existing Microsoft account or create a new one. So you don't have to know what their Microsoft account address is.
On that note, the easiest way I tell people externally to login when they get a link is to use their Skype account. Everyone usually has Skype, and that's a Microsoft account so it works well.
