Forum Discussion
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
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.
Sahil AroraMicrosoft
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.
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.
TonyRedmond wrote: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.
This information has been very helpful to me. So has Tony's article. The question I have is...Can a guest user be added to a dynamic distribution list?
Thanks
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!)
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!
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
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.
Thanks for the update Sahil most appreciated.
Is there an update to the timeline for this? It's now mid-April and this feature still isn't available!
Pat Woods wrote:Is there an update to the timeline for this? It's now mid-April and this feature still isn't available!
"Add Mail Contact as guest to Office 365 Group" is still listed as 'In Development'. I haven't seen an actual timeline associated with that status.
https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-roadmap#abc
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.
