Forum Discussion
Maxwell Shifman
Feb 13, 2019Copper Contributor
SharePoint Guests vs Azure AD Guests
I'm trying to understand the use of SharePoint Online Guests and the integration with Azure AD. We use External Sharing via SharePoint/OneDrive for Business extensively, with the default being to...
StephenRice
Microsoft
Jul 08, 2020Hi roniy,
Do you mean for the expiration feature? There is no difference for this feature.
Going a little more technical: Each site/OneDrive has an object called the User Info Table which stores information about the users who have access to content (regardless of whether they were added to the entire site or to a single file or folder). This expiration feature adds an expiration date to that user's entry in the User Info Table so that when they expire, they lose access.
Hope that helps!
Stephen Rice
EDIT FOR POSTERITY: This probably belonged in a different thread and isn't directly related to this subject matter 🙂
roniy
Jul 08, 2020Brass Contributor
That's helpful, thanks!
Actually I was asking about the creation of guest users in AAD - is there a difference between sharing a site and sharing a file/folder?
I commented on a few different threads so sorry for the confusion 🙂
- roniySep 03, 2020Brass Contributor
Hi StephenRice , I have a related question:
Can external users (not in AAD) be added to SharePoint groups?
- StephenRiceJul 08, 2020
Microsoft
Ha! You are totally right! My mistake 🙂
To answer your actual question, yes, there are differences between file/folder sharing and site sharing (especially when Azure B2B integration is disabled). Site sharing requires account creation (either AAD or MSA) while file/folder sharing go through the One Time Passcode flow (which doesn't always result in account creation).
Once Azure B2B is enabled, both file/folder sharing and site sharing go through the same B2B flow which results in guest account creation 🙂
Hopefully this answers your actual question this time! 😄
Stephen