Introducing guest access for Office 365 Groups!

[Kady Dundas]

Today, we announced the new guest access feature for Office 365 Groups, the group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365. The new guest access feature gives you the ability to include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group.

• Get the details in this blog post
• Learn more about collaborating outside the firewall with Office 365 Groups at this session at Ignite
• Check out the whole lineup of sessions on Office 365 Groups at Ignite here!

@Christophe Fiessinger @Shashi Singaravel

[#2]

We can expect this soon as Office 365 Groups has supported guest access.
https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/11585187-al...

[#3]

The issue is that Planner is a completely separate application that involves other components than just Groups (the task metadata, for instance). As such, Planner needs to be updated before it picks up the new guest access mechanism. This work is being done, as I understand, but it will take time to complete. Expect an update at Ignite next week.

[#4]

Thanks @Jaroslav Karlik for reaching out!

1. For external users to access resources, the user has to first redeem itself, which users can do through the View Files link in Welcome email, they will be redirected to the sign-up/sign-in page. Gmail users can create an Microsoft account through this sign-up process with login id as exactly same as their gmail-id, for e.g. bob@gmail.com can have Microsoft account as bob@gmail.com and use its Microsoft account credentials to login. This account can be used by Gmail user to access any shared resource with him in that tenant.

2. Guest access for planner is in the road-map. 

[#5]

By the way, the process to redeem an invitation (to essentially validate the guest user object created in AAD) is described in https://www.petri.com/external-access-office-365-groups. Just saying.

[#6]

Hi Kady,

Outlook 365 and Sharepoint are relatively new tools in our company and seems to have nicely useful features. I have started using the share point group feature for the past year (with my team members).

I have the following issue regarding groups:

I want to share some of our teamwork with other members of the organization, allowing those members limited privileges accessing certain folders and files within our group files. 

I have searched the web, unfortunately, I did not find any solution for my criteria. 

Does share point allow adding organization members as guests or limited access?

Thanks,

Zohar Shemesh

[#7]

Hi @Zohar Shemesh

In Groups' jargon, "members" are users (internal or external to the organization) who are part of the Group and hence have access to all the Group resources.

On the other hand, you can share Group items (files or folders) with other users (internal or external) who are not members (i.e. not part of the Group), provided that the sharing configuration of the tenant and of the Group allows it.