External Sharing - Licensing

[David Gorman]

Hi all,

We need to share a word document with about 500 external people (assume they all have consumer email addresses and aren't Office 365 users in any other tenant).

My first thought was just to use OneDrive/SharePoint and send a unique sharing link with edit permissions to a copy of the document.

Is this possible? Will those external users need to be licensed to edit the document? Will they be able to edit the document without registering for a Microsoft account?

I'm sure I'm missing something as rarely is anything simple with O365!

Thanks

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @David Gorman

There isn’t licensing costs if simply shared from sharepoint/onedrive.

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/share-onedrive-files-and-folders-9fcc2f7d-de0c-4cec-93b0-a8...

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/manage-sharing-with-external-users-in-office-365-small-busi...

Set to share with anyone with a link. AFAIK they don’t need to register for a Microsoft account however I would quickly double check this by testing with, for example a test gmail account

Hope that answers your question

Best, Chris

[#3]

Thanks @Christopher Hoard I was hoping it would work like that. Sharing a document via OneDrive isn't restricted to the 5:1 guest user limitations are they? That's just for actual guests?

[#4]

The 5:1 is to do with guests and leveraging Azure AD features in the tenant such as MFA and Azure AD. The defining article is here

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/b2b/licensing-guidance

In this case you aren’t giving them guests access it’s just external sharing

Hope that answers your question!

Best, Chris