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George Khalil's avatar
George Khalil
Copper Contributor
Sep 18, 2016
Solved

Cannot add a "contact" in Exchange Online to an Office 365 Group as a Guest

Looks like this is an issue - I have successfully been able to add external recipients as guests in an Office 365 Group if they are not listed in the GAL, however when I come to add a contact listed in the GAL as a guest, I receive the below warning;

 

"You are trying to add a contact created by your admin. Contact your admin to add the user as a guest to this group"

 

Help please.

 

Thanks

  • Pat Woods's avatar
    Pat Woods
    Copper Contributor

    Is there an update to the timeline for this? It's now mid-April and this feature still isn't available!

      • Casey Popp's avatar
        Casey Popp
        Copper Contributor

        So, where is this now. I followed your link to the road map and cannot find a reference to this. I have this issue as well and would like to know when it will be a reality.

  • Microsoft now has an Office 365 Roadmap item to allow a mail contact to be added as an external guest to an Office 365 group. It's coming... (like Christmas!)

    • PittSharePointPro's avatar
      PittSharePointPro
      Iron Contributor

      Hi Tony, Thanks for the reply and great to know!  Any ideas on garnering a soft target date of 'rolling out' status on this?  I believe 'first half of 2017' was mentioned earlier in the thread.

       

      Cheers!

      • TonyRedmond's avatar
        TonyRedmond
        MVP

        It is "under development" so could be revealed to First Release tenants at any time. I think this is a reasonably simple change, so I would expect it in the short term.

  • I cound't agree more!  The guest access to groups is basically useless for my orgainization until it can coexist with exchange contacts.  We have a ton of distribution lists and forwarding accounts.  

     

    This push that Microsoft has to move distribution groups to Office 365 groups isn't going to work for us.  It's kind of anoying to tell the truth.  I don't see distribution groups or forwarding accounts going away anytime soon so this needs to be supported.  

    • Sahil Arora's avatar
      Sahil Arora
      Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft

      Thanks folks for the feedback! This is something that we are actively working on for first half of 2017. We will keep you posted with updates.

      • PittSharePointPro's avatar
        PittSharePointPro
        Iron Contributor

        I have a client that is experiencing similar issue as described by other folks on this thread: external user emails are in a dist list and we cannot add them to groups, which is a critical requirement.

         

        Thank you for this response regarding this issue.  I see that it's been a couple months since this reply.  Are there any noteworthy updates?  Is there a site or page we can use to track progress?

         

        Cheers!

  • Thanks George Khalil for reaching out! Currently adding of mail contacts as guest is not supported, however there is way you can add mail contacts for which you would need the administrator to remove the other mail-enabled object, after which the guest user object can be added by the group owner or by an administrator running cmdlet with mSExchHideFromAddressLists property as $false, this property would ensure that the contact is visible in GAL.

    You can refer tenant admin documentation https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Guest-access-to-Office-365-groups-Admin-Help-7c713d74-a144-4eab-92e7-d50df526ff96?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

     

    Alternatively there is a very good and informative article written by TonyRedmond https://www.petri.com/external-access-office-365-groups about guests in Groups, which includes details about Guests in Groups.

    • TonyRedmond's avatar
      TonyRedmond
      MVP

      By the way, if you remove a mail-enabled contact so that you can add a new guest user for the same SMTP address, you might wonder whether that guest user object can be used in Exchange distribution lists. The official answer might be no, because the picker control used in EAC to select objects to add to DLs won't include guest users. However, PowerShell comes to the rescue (once again) as you can use the Add-DistributionGroupMember to add a guest user to a DL.

      • Todd Felmly's avatar
        Todd Felmly
        Copper Contributor

        We are setup in a Hybrid environement. We have a ton of mail-contacts on our on-prem Exchange environment as they are members of distribution groups. Because of that, group owners are running into the error stated in this thread.

         

        Removing the mail-contact will allow the group owner to add the user as a guest but removing the contact removes DL membership. Our distribution groups are on-prem and don't see the guest users that are in-cloud as expected. Running an add-distribtiongroupmember in the Office 365 PowerShell fails as the DL's are on-prem.

         

        Seems to me that we need to re-create the distribtion groups in the cloud in order for guests to be added?

         

        The problem with that is we integrate our ERP system with Exchange via PowerShell scripts to build/update these lists nightly based on roles. The PowerShell is expecting to see the lists on-prem which won't work because of the guest in-cloud accounts.

         

        The only workaround I've come up with is to delete the on-prem mail-contact, have the group owner add the user as a guest (in-cloud), then re-create the mail-contact (on-prem). This all works but we get dirsync errors about a dupe.

         

         Any cleaner way of doing this?

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