Forum Discussion

Copper Contributor

Sep 18, 2016

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 ...

Sahil Arora
Sep 19, 2016
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.

Stephen Schwartz

Copper Contributor

Jan 12, 2017

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
Microsoft
Jan 12, 2017
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.
- Philip Worrell
  Steel Contributor
  Jan 16, 2017
  Thanks for the update Sahil most appreciated.
- Jason Ozin
  Copper Contributor
  Jan 19, 2017
  Wow this is a really big limitation. This afternoon I put aside time to move a bunch of our groups from Linux MailMan to 365 Groups and fell at the first hurdle. It is very probable that the sort of "guest" users you will want to add to such a group would already reside in the GAL as a contact. Especially an organisation that is membership based like we are.
  
  Shame.
  
  Be good when thius is fixed.
- PittSharePointPro
  Iron Contributor
  Mar 11, 2017
  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!