Licensing requirement for accessing read only SharePoint Online team site

[David Jennings]

Can a user without a SharePoint Online licence access (read only) a SharePoint Online team site?

Thanks

Dave

[#2]

If your user is not part of your organization, they can be invited to your SharePoint environment as an external user if your site collection is configred to allow that. If your user is part of your organization, I'm not sure if that user would have to be invited as an external user or if you'd have to pursue a higher license to get them in. Could you tell us if the user you have in mind is internal or external?

[#3]

SharePoint Online doesnt really enforce license requirements, so users without license can still access content. Permissions are not dependant on the license either, if you want to restrict them use the SPO permission model.

[#4]

If they're part of your organization, you must have a license for your user regardless of level of access.

[#5]

I agree with Vasil, we found (by accident) that you could 'share' a site with an internal user without an O365 licence and even give that user edit rights. However, that's all they can see, they don't see anything in the waffle menu if they have no licence.

[#6]

@Andrew Warland, can I ask if said user had any license type at all, and if so, what license?

[#7]

@Matt Coats the users who could access the site had no O365 licence at all. We have been able to share the sites with anyone in our organisation. We stumbled across this by accident when we found that users we had shared a site with (with edit rights) were editing content on the site and asked me a question about it. It was only then we realised they had no licence.

[#8]

Thanks for all of the replies. It is interesting that it is physically possible without a licence, although I guess we have to be careful as lots of things are physically possible with Microsoft software, but it doesn't mean that it will be licensed compliantly.

It looks like you do need a license to do this, as in the OST (Online Services Terms) it mentions the below,

"Each user that accesses the Online Service must be assigned a User SL"

What we are trying to do is definitely "access the online service", therefore we will need to ensure we have a USL for these users.