Forum Discussion
SP Online and contractors
We want to provide contractors with access to some areas of our SP Online environment. Have read about external sharing and it seems suitable as: *contractors may work infrequently (from a few days...
You have to buy licenses for them in your tenant.
If the contractor is considered 'outside the organization' as a vendor and works off site rather than on-site, then you can share. For example, if you hired a contractor and you gave them a desk, laptop and corp email address, then they need a license.
For 'outsiders' and they have their own email address, then you can share site or documents as an external user. The outsider contractor would have to create an MS account and there user id would be their email address.
For 'outsiders' and they have their own email address, then you can share site or documents as an external user. The outsider contractor would have to create an MS account and there user id would be their email address.
@Roy K wrote:
If the contractor is considered 'outside the organization' as a vendor and works off site rather than on-site, then you can share. For example, if you hired a contractor and you gave them a desk, laptop and corp email address, then they need a license.
For 'outsiders' and they have their own email address, then you can share site or documents as an external user. The outsider contractor would have to create an MS account and there user id would be their email address.Hi Roy K. What you say makes sense, and also would fit our situation, as contractors are all off-site/ external. But where does Microsoft officially say this?
All I can find is the statement posted above "External users are not employees, contractors, or onsite agents for either you or your affiliates".
This does not distinguish between on-site and off-site contractors.
- Hi Paul,
So where I came to my determination was with a call with an MS account manager about a year ago about assessing SP Online for external sharing. I can't recall the exact words, but it was my general take away. The word contractor here is vague. To make sure, you would have to discuss with an MS account manager or maybe create a support ticket to get this question answered. Or maybe Salvatore has some documentation to backup his claim.Hi roykim.
I was just asking the same to you: do you have any documentation to backup what you say?
I am afraid that without an official written document that states the contrary, the rule is clear: a contractor is a contractor and cannot be considered an external user, and that's all.
I know that TonyRedmond is very precise in such kind of things: maybe he can chime in...
Paul, We have a scenario where a person sitting beside me is considered "external" in microsoft's terminology becuase our company decided to not migrate the person into office-365. Hence physical boundaries (off-site/on-site) may not be of much of significance when microsoft say "external".
Office-365 makes it very easy and safe to provide access to third-party participants, but they would need an email address supported by microsoft (e.g. Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail etc),
but no gmail or corporate email addresses not having the office-365 subscription.If the number of users are limited and few then you can create email addresses (e.g. by having them register in live.com) and share the site with those email addresses.
If there are large number of users then if the information is to be made available publicly then You can post or send users a guest link that they can use to view individual documents on your site anonymously.
- Vivek,
I have to say that your first paragraph is not true. You can indeed have a gmail address granted that you create an MS account with it. Even corporate email addresses too. Have you tried? I have a handful of times.
Once you do that, you can do external sharing with that email address.- Thanks Roy for correcting me.
