Forum Discussion
Cannot add a "contact" in Exchange Online to an Office 365 Group as a Guest
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.
That's actually what we have been discussing internally but as you said, may get really messy.
I'm at a conference with Michael Van Hybrid today and asked him what he would do... He's contemplating the issue right now and might come up with a better solution. I shall let you know what he says.
I work at a large university and we sync all contacts campus wide (multiple email tenants). Simply hiding these external contacts just isn't an option for my organization. We really want to roll out groups, but without this functionality we simply can't move forward. Any ideas on when this feature may be available?We have the same issue in our organization. I hope they come up with a better solution.
We have a similar issue.
My customers organisation want contacts in the GAL and distribution lists loaded from our CRM nightly.
Yet we need to give access to people at those email addresses access to Sharepoint / OneDrive etc using Guest accounts.
Currently we are still maintaining an on prem instance of Sharepoint for these external users to access. We are under pressure to decomission this farm due to a datacenter move.
The only other option we have is to license our external users sync their existing extranet AD accounts to Azure AD. Which we already tried once and failed due to the contacts being duplicate and accounts taking precident. Which then removed the contacts from the distribution lists!
The guest accounts and mail enabled contact need to either co-exist or be merged as a single object which retains the DL membership.
Appreciate your help!
