OneDrive File Sharing With Team Member That Does Not Have a Mailbox / Ex Employees Showing Up

[CGunter]

Hi All,

We have a situation where one team member has attempted to share a document via OneDrive with another team member, but received a bounced email notification. When I looked into this, it was because the team member they attempted to share the document with does not have an Exchange license (the team member currently only has a Power BI Pro license). 

From my understanding, sharing files both internally and externally does not require a license. So the fact that the user shows up in attempting to share with them makes sense. My question however, is there a way to prevent the sharing of documents with internal users that do not have an Exchange license? That way I can help our end users avoid receiving a bounce back message.  

We have also noticed that former employees can be autocompleted when attempting to share files via OneDrive. When looking into SharePoint, we can see that former employees continue to have a SharePoint user profile. Would this in any way to be related to converting the former employees mailbox into a shared mailbox?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Corey

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hey @CGunter ,

This is an expected behavior and you are right, sharing files with someone doesn't require a license. Even if the user doesn't have any license assigned it would still show up when you type the user's name while sharing out a file. The lookup basically is happening against the users in Azure active directory, so if there is an entry present for the user in active directory his name will come up in the people picker. This has nothing to do with shared mailbox conversion; Sharepoint maintains its own directory of user profiles based on whatever users are present in azure active directory; all users present in azure active directory have a profile in sharepoint.

Currently there is no way to disable sharing against a particular account while keeping the user profile for the account itself functional in sharepoint; based on your use case, users still want to share a file with an unlicensed user and the concern is that they are getting a bounce back, the best approach would be to educate the users around how to 'copy a link' while sharing and share that with the other user when the other user is not enabled for email.

Thanks

[#3]

Hi @harveer singh,

I appreciate your response. This makes sense. I will discuss this with our team and see what the next steps should be. Thank you again for the response!