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Guest Users vs. External Users
At this point, I cannot see any difference between the two wordings: it appears to me that "Guest User" and "External User" have exactly the same meaning, with the former being only a more "modern" wording. Am I correct?
On the other hand, "Guest User" is frequently used in Microsoft documentation when speaking about Groups, and this IMO creates a lot of confusion with "Guest Member", which is a separate concept (in fact, I believe that a "Guest Member" of a Group is always a "Guest User", but not necessarily viceversa).
Am I missing something?
We use the terms interchangeably at Microsoft as well. External user is an older term from back when all "guests" in the directory authenticated outside of the home tenant. When we added support for managed guest users (i.e. the user authenticates inside the home tenant), the "external" piece stopped making sense and "guest user" was born.
And as with many of these types of things, we ended up using both names to refer to the same set of features. If there is a feature/scenario where this language does make a difference, we try to make sure it's clearly labeled to avoid confusion.
Thanks,
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
- Bob German
Microsoft
There is indeed a difference between "Guest" and "External" users; see this docs page for details! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/communicate-with-users-from-other-organizations I agree there is a confussion around both terms that should be clarified...indeed to make it even more difficult, you can create "guests users" in Office 365 and then you will be able to invite them as external users in SPO Sites. By the way, adding here some folks to discuss about this: TonyRedmond VasilMichev cfiessinger
- Valid remark! Looking forward to this discussion.
I've been using the terms interchangingly, whether Microsoft puts a different meaning to those or not :)
