Forum Discussion
SP Online and contractors
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...
My take on this topic is that the term ""contractor" is very generic and differs from company to company depending on the market they operate within, their business model, and country. The so-called "gig economy" has created many contractors, if you accept that these people are not full-time employees but are engaged by enterprises to deliver specific services on behalf of those enterprises.
Like any legal agreement, you have to read it to understand what the intent is. My understanding is that Microsoft does not want to create a situation where long-term contractors, who are almost employees, are brought into the Office 365 ecosystem without licenses. In other words, you use a tenant with a few licenses to generate documents that are then farmed out to hundreds of contractors via sharing to allow them to work on those documents. This might be acceptable for a short-term burst of activity, but unacceptable over a longer term.
If in doubt, the safest approach is to assign contractors an account within the tenant and license them for whatever work they need to do.
TR