Licensing for external guests in Office 365 Groups

[John Wynne]

I noticed adding an external user to an Office Group adds a user to my tenant which is reported as unlicensed in the Admin Centre. Is there an official help topic on how licensing applies when adding external guests? An important admin task if users are allowed to add, change and delete guests on demand.

[#2]

Thanks for pointing this out. We are a small company so don't often need to access our O365 admin - I would have gone in months later and wondered how my guest users got into our O365 space 🙂 I'll be interested in the response to your question. 

[#3 · Accepted solution]

The Office 365 Admin Center is actually pretty dumb about reporting unlicensed users. It considers the accounts used for site mailboxes (still a few clinging on) or the disabled accounts used for resource mailboxes to be unlicensed whereas you don't need to assign an Office 365 license to any of these objects.

Likewise, you don't need licences for guest users and a fix is coming to prevent the Office 365 Admin Center being quite so viligent about reporting guest users as being unlicensed. I met this issue during the beta of guest users, reported it, and was told that it would be addressed after the feature shipped. I'm waiting to see it show up.

TR

[#4]

Thanks for the clarification Tony. Glad to hear a fix is coming for this. I'm a stickler for licence compliance and really expect Microsoft to assist me in achieving it.

[#5]

has there been any progress with this request?  we are also looking to share data within our office 365 groups externally.  Still trying to figure out the proper licensing for them.