Forum Discussion
External User Account Creation
We currently use SharePoint online for our company intranet site and have recently created a new members site. The members site is a new site collection for external members (approx. 200). Can anybody suggest a method to invite 200 external users?
I did investigate Azure B2B, but the lack of provision for consumer email addressess (@gmail, @yahoo) is a problem. It would appear that B2C is not appropriate for SharePoint online, so sending sharing invitations would appear to be the best option. My concern is that if we rely on the member to create the account, many members will not bother.
11 Replies
I have a related question:
When is Microsoft planning to roll out sharing O365 SharePoint sites with external users who have gmail accounts?
I saw demos at Ignite conference that showed granting access to external users who had gmail accounts but when I tried to test it in my Office 365 account, external user could not authenticate using a gmail account. Authentication worked for external users who had a Microsoft (Live) account. However, in many scenarios there is a need to grant access to people who have only gmail accounts (volunteer workers or small subcontractors or freelancers).
This is not a perfect solution to this issue, but this is how we are going to deal with it,
http://blog.atwork.at/post/2014/12/06/How-to-use-external-users-in-SharePoint-Online-with-a-cost-free-Azure-Active-Directory
- You can use ADD-SPOUSER to provision all 200 users to access your site after tagging them as guests in Azure AD as @Juan said.
Thank you for your replies.
Are you suggesting that I add users with business email addresses via B2B and users with consumer emails via an alternative method? Can you explain the process to add the consumer e-mails to Azure AD? I know how to add a users, but I then have 4 choices,
New user in organisation
User with existing Microsoft account
User in another Microsoft Azure AD directory
Users in partner companies
Any advice would be much appreciated.
- You need to pick Users in partner companies. When you add users with business email addresses via B2B they will receive an invite to access this site. You can also use ADD-SPOUSER cmd to provision users to site even if they have not accepted the access invite. You can use this cmd after adding users to Azure AD.
- Another approach could be to add those consumer e-mails (that should be mapped to a Live ID) to your Azure AD and then simply tag them as guests in your Azure AD so you can share SPO Sites with them
