SharePoint Online - External Sharing, licensing

[Azam Javaid]

Hi all

I have a few questions regarding external sharing in SharePoint. Very simply my scenario is an organisation I am working with wants to share content with a lot of external users. They want to present the information in a nicer way than the OOTB web parts, so using RSWP.

1) Can anybody clarify at what point an external user needs to be licensed? So if I share a site with subsites with a user they can navigate around and access content etc. without any issues.

- Can they use search?

- If I build some web parts using Results Search Web Part will these cause any issues? Either accessing or licensing related? 

- Effectively they are using all the read capabilities of SharePoint, which I assume requires them to be licensed. I am trying to work out at what point they need to stop before a license is required - hope that makes sense.

2) What is the easiest way to share with approx 400 external users? Can I just create a group and add all the email addresses?

3) Do all the users need to have a live ID?

I've worked with sharing externally before but not for this many users or feature set.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Azam

[#2 · Accepted solution]

My 2 cents:
1) If they are external users, they don't need a SPO license and they can take full advantage of SPO features
2) Azure B2B
3) Not necessarily

[#3]

Hi Juan

Many thanks for your help. Much appreciated.

Is there any chance you have links with more information, especially 2) and 3)?

Thanks again

Azam

[#4]

Hi,

you can find more details here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-b2b-o365-external-user

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhwrweCBdsc

Kind regards

[#5]

Good Morning,

External users cannot use Enterprise Search however, they are allowed to get content via Cross Site Collection Publishing which is based on Search. The Cross SC Publishing is a specific set of data that is being surfaced by Search so that is why it is allowed for External users.

You should be able to add the external users to a group, they are utilized the same as your internal users from a security perspective. The only things that you cannot do with External users is make them a site owner. They also cannot install software from the tenant but that is about it, everything else works the same. All External users will need to register their email with Microsoft but not necessarily a LiveID. Hope this helps.

[#6]

Thanks for the information. Much appreciated.

Azam

[#7]

Hi

A few follow on questions from this. I've been doing some testing with external sharing sites. A few days ago I shared a site with a gmail account. When I tried to log in using the gmail account I was asked to create a password but not a Microsoft account. Today I tried the same with a different gmail account and get prompted to create a Microsoft account.

Has anyone else seem this behaviour?

Is external sharing only possible with certain email addresses? My client wants to use nhs.net accounts but they are having issues. The accounts are being recognised as company accounts. They are not O365 accounts however the customer is not give any further options.

Does the external email address have to be linked to a Microsoft account? So all who do no have one will have to created one?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Azam

[#8]

I was able to add an external user as site collection admin. There was no problem at all. This kind of contradicts the microsoft documentation. Any ideas?

[#9]

Actually that does not contradict the documentation at all. The role of site collection ADMIN is open to external users as well as full control but the OWNER role is not. When you create a new site collection attempt to add an external user at that point and you will see the difference.

[#10]

Thanks for the clarification. I clearly got confused there !

[#11]

No worries. The roles can be confusing sometimes. Have a pleasant day. 

[#12]

Hi Azam,

Did you ever sort this out? I'm trying to do the same thing on a smaller scale. Again using nhs.net addresses.

Thanks,