Forum Discussion

Iron Contributor

Feb 08, 2018

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 a...

Anonymous

Feb 08, 2018

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.

Luke Hoffman

Iron Contributor

Feb 12, 2018

Great explanation. Thank you.

StephenRice
Microsoft
Feb 12, 2018
Luke Hoffman,

Lots of good feedback in this thread. When it comes to external sharing, there are two "buckets" of sharing that users can use today. First, you can share a site, add a user to an O365 group or directly add the user to the directory. All of these use AAD B2B as the underlying method of "invitation" and result in the targeted user having an account created in your directory. If you share a file or folder in ODB/SPO, you'll get the new flow that Salvatore mentioned. This does not require the user to create an account in your directory and relies on using a one time passcode to verify that the user owns the e-mail address that you shared to. And, as always, there's more improvements coming here in the future. Let me know if you have any other questions!

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II