External access to O365 Groups access from the external user point of view

[Chrys Scariot]

Hi,

I have a user who has been invited to an O365 group as a guest member by another organisation.

He originally received the 'standard' welcome email with the details of what he could access, but can no longer find that email.

The O365 Group no longer appears in his outlook.

How can he access the group conversation and files again?

The person who invited him to join the group has confirmed he is a guest member of the group but does not kow how to get him to access the group again. 

[#2]

External Groups are not accessible in Outlook, you can only interact with them via the browser. In general you should be able to generate the links used to open conversations/files/etc manually, but some of them seem to require information such as the objectID of the guest user, so it won't be an easy task, especially for a non-admin. Perhaps removing/re-adding the user will be easier?

[#3]

The "standard" email when you are invited for an Office 365 Group is different for external users. In the external user's email, there are no links to check out the calendar or take part in conversations. That is because, what Vasil already said, external users don't have access to the Exchange part (conversations and calendar) of a Group. Nor do they have access to Planner, OneNote, Teams, Stream, etc. for that matter. The only place external users have access to, is the SharePoint site that is connected to the Group. So the person who invited the user, can give the URL to the SharePoint site.

You'll see that for internal users, when they visit the SharePoint site, there is a link to go to the conversations of that Group in the right top corner. When external users access that same site, the link is not there. Again, because they don't have access to the conversations. They can still participate in conversations, but through email only.

[#4]

Hi Marteen,

Thank you for the very clear and detailed reply, i shall pass this on to the user (and the person who invited him to the group) and see how they get on.

Also very useful for our organisation when we start inviting external users.

[#5]

Thank you Vasil for clarifying this.  I'll suggest the adding the user again if all else fails.