OneDrive Message Center Updates for June 1-15, 2018

The update to external sharing is much appreciated. Do they still go through the same kind of sign up as if they had been invited through the B2B AAD flow where they see links to terms and policies? And is this only for organizational accounts? Why not at least let us decide for ourselves whether we want to allow Microsoft accounts to be added automatically too?

A normal user in our organization does not understand the difference between sharing with someone who has an organizational account, a Microsoft account or none of those. Thus they don’t understand why different external people get different features when they sign in to the folder that was shared with them. External users should have the same features available, regardless of whether or not they have been added as a guest. I mean we’re talking about the ability to create new files in Office online, copy/move files, etc. If I share a folder with someone and give them “Write” permission, I expect them to be able to do this, given how things work right now. That is not to say that rights couldn’t be distinguished between create, delete, read and write, though.

This is really welcome, such a good idea, it will help customers stay informed and better prepared for change, summarizing these OneDrive highlights from recent Message Center posts.

Hi Allan With Sørensen, thanks for your interest in the feature and your questions!

With respect to your question around whether the recipients get the same kind of sign-up as if they had been invited through AAD B2B invitaiton manager, I assume you're referring to the invitation acceptance flow? If so, the answer is no. This update does not take the user through the B2B invitation acceptance flow. Instead, the experience will be such that if the external recipient does not already have a Guest account in your organization's directory then they will go through the one time passcode experience we released earlier this year (just like before this update). The difference is that after they've entered the passcode, if we detect that they already have an Office 365 account then we will ask them to sign-in if they aren't already signed-in and then create a Guest account in your directory. Once they have a Guest account, they'll never again be asked for a one-time passcode.

If you have configured a link to your privacy statement then they will see that link as part of the one-time passcode flow.

Yes, this is currently only for organizational accounts. We absolutely understand the desire to have the same behavior for Microsoft accounts. We have nothing to announce right now, but hope to share more about this in the future. Please stay tuned!

In general, external users *should* have the same features available to them whether they signed-in to an account or whether they gained access via a one-time passcode. The primary exception to this is the ability to open and edit Office documents using the desktop apps. With that said, I just gave this a try and am noticing that one-time passcode users are in fact unable to create new Office documents in a folder while Guest accounts can, just like you said. Let me follow up with the team on that. I was however able to successfully copy/move as the one-time passcode user. Feel free to PM me with more details or differences in capabilities you're noticing between both types of users.

Hi

I think during the invite redemption process, MS asks the user to select whether they are redeeming invite for Microsoft A/c or Organisational a/c, instead why cant you check it internally this way we can avoid lot of confusion and issues around the redemption, some of the external users d'nt understand which account they are using.

Also, while redeeming the invite, why cant you force the user to enter the email id instead of just picking up from their already logged in details as people will be using their public domains, work ids, school ids, outlook, hotmail etc it just picks up randomly and gives unrelated errors and in some cases it expires the invite.

Need to simplify this process a bit as many of our external users are getting it wrong and causing confusion

rgds

Prasanna

This is really a welcome(d) feature.  Improving communication with the user community and admin community helps tremendously.  I am looking forward to more open communications like this

Hope to see more.

Hi mco365,

If you have your organization configured to only allow sharing to guest users who are already in your directory, then this change will have no impact on you whatsoever. It only applies to sharing to new external users. Thanks!

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

Can you confirm this feature would not impact configurations where the setting to "only allow pre-registered accounts in AAD" is selected ? E.g. as we have tight control of external users creation processes, e.g. with approval procedures, this would not generate unexpectedly Guest accounts.  

The news about the enhancements to the external sharing process is great progress. I understand not everyone has Office 365 accounts... Would the same process be used for users who use a personal account? 

The reason I ask, is on the Introducing a new secure external sharing experience blog, guest users who are not in AAD were not able to edit documents on the desktop, if shared a document from another tenant. It sounds like if users have an Office 365 account, AAD will add them and should be able to edit documents on their desktop. Will this apply to guest accounts who have personal Microsoft accounts and not Office 365 accounts?