Forum Discussion
Inviting/Adding External Users to Modern Team Sites
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.