Forum Discussion
Inviting/Adding External Users to Modern Team Sites
Hi,
I've been tearing my hair out on how to invite both the follow user types to a modern Sharepoint site:
- External user (no on Office 365 - but have a microsoft account)
- External user (Office 365 user on another tenant)
I can't find an definitive and clearly laid out methodology on how to do this. I've look on many threads here and the various methods I've tried don't work. Sometimes the user gets the invite in their mailbox, sometimes they don't (not in spam etc).
I even tried today to create a new Sharepoint site as per this page: https://blogs.office.com/2016/11/08/create-connected-sharepoint-online-team-sites-in-seconds/ by clicing the + Create Site at top left of Sharepoint and when I added the members, in step 2, it would not allow me to add the email address for one of my clients on another tenant, and when I put it my own @outlook.com email account, the invitation never arrived at that address.
I've also tried the other way of creating the group first in OWA, then adding the members there, but that does not work either.
Is there something wrong with the modern sites/groups at the moment?
Can someone please point me to some instructions on this, or even better a video that's updated and shows how this is done.
Many thanks.
12 Replies
Today sharing to external user accounts worked for me in SharePoint Online (Office 365).
Just use the "Share" action on a file in SharePoint Web App, enter an external e-mail address, wait until it gets displayed in the user selection list, then select it.
Different behavior until yesterday:
While using "Share" still did not work for external user accounts, using "Grant Access" made it (SharePoint Web Access: Details > Manage access or Share > ... > Manage access).
Some accounts got displayed by "FirstName LastName", one got displayed as "E-Mail Address" - why? (all test accounts got configured the same way; checking in Azure AD showed First Name, Last Name and E-Mail Address attributes were populated the same way for all test external user accounts).
Then, when sharing or checking permissions, it was not possible to view the e-mail address of an external user in case of multiple persons with the same name. Today, this works!
Things seems to get better, but still a nightmare in a company environment (if you do not want to establish a dedicated SharePoint team).
Please note: It seems if you got a mail user or mail contact in your AD / o365 with the same (external) e-mail address you are trying to share with, creation of the required external user account will fail, and thus sharing will not work.
Happened to me yesterday, but I did not verify today.
Tejas MehtaMicrosoft
Hi - there are a couple of resources that describe how to enable/manage external users for Office 365 Groups:
- Guests in Groups: Allows you to configure ability to add guest members to the group, giving access to the full set of group resources
- External Sharing for group sites: The article is linked to a broader page on PowerShell admin/management of Office 365 Groups, but there is a section that calls out how to enable external sharing for sites connected to Office 365 Groups. Note that the default for group connected sites is to only allow sharing with external users that already exist in your organization's directory. See example (pasting relevant section) below. Note that we are planning on changing the default for this setting to enable external sharing:
Manage external sharing for Office 365 Group site collections
By default, all SharePoint site collections that are part of an Office 365 Group have the sharing setting set to Allow sharing only with the external users that already exist in your organization’s directory. To change this setting, you can use the Set-SPOSite Windows PowerShell cmdlet.
Example:
Set-SPOSite -Identity https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/site1 -SharingCapability ExternalUserSharingOnly
This example updates the external sharing capability of the site collection "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/site1" to allow sharing with authenticated external users. This cmdlet is executed immediately.
To view the existing sharing setting, use the Get-SPOSite Windows PowerShell cmdlet.
Example:
(Get-SPOSite -Identity https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/site1).SharingCapability
For detailed information about these cmdlets and their parameters in Windows PowerShell, see Set-SPOSite and Get-SPOSite.
i agree with jcgonzalezmartin, take a look at these instructions https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-b2b-what-is-azure-ad-b2b
I have a series of articles that discusses external users, B2B and governance.
- And forget to mention that Azure B2B is also ok for 1) with latest additions in the service
Hi Jason Rhodes,
External users are not supported yet. You will have to create additional accounts within your tenant to give external users access.
If that's the case, why is it that in a new test site I created today, I invited myself via my *@outlook.com email account, and the invite was received at that address as I'm able to interact with the files in the site.
Is that your MSDN/Microsoft account that is connected to your corporate account?
