Can user without licenses access Sharepoint Online?

[Linkang]

Hi All,

Want to check if some users from our company dont have any license, but they have Azure AD Account, can they access Sharepoint Online? what is the limitation?

Thanks

Lin Kang

[#2]

They can, yes, as Microsoft doesn't usually enforce licensing requirements in code. Which is not to say that you should be doing that, it still constitutes a violation of the licensing agreement.

[#3]

They can, but they shouldn't because you will be fall under a non-compliance scenario in regards of corporate users accessing Microsoft 365 services

[#4]

@Linkang 

No legally! This is very common in organizations that have a mix of licenses.

Ej. Some users may have Office 365 E3, and others only Exchange Online Plan 1. These Exchange Online users cannot legally access SharePoint Online shares and/or OneDrive shared by other users, nor access Teams meetings.

It's very simple: All users in the organization who want to use a service need to have their corresponding license. Besides this is something auditable.
This is different when we talk about external users of the organization. An external user accesses as a guest with limited functionalities, and obviously no license is required for external users.

[#5]

@DaniAlonso 

Hello, is it ok for a company to add external users with an unlicensed normal user account instead of a guest account. Is this a non-compliance scenario and not legal? Are there other disadvantages or complications compared to a guest account. Normaly i would not recommend a client to use for their external users unlicensed normal user accounts but i cant find any argue agianst it. 

[#6]

@Jan_Koeckstadt I am in the same situation. We want to securely share documents in GCC High from a Sharepoint site to screened external users. Because of compliance issues we have turned off the ability to share to external users. So we need to add these users as internal users with no license only for the purpose of sharing these documents. Is that OK?