Importing a list of users from Outlook (or Excel) into SharePoint permissions?

[Toby McDaid]

We have a SharePoint site which needs to be shared externally with a large group of users. Typically, when you share a site externally, you enable external sharing and simply enter their email address into the 'share site' window and press 'share'.

When you're doing this for one or two people it's no problem, but we have a list of about 200 external email addresses which need to be added. This list has been sent to me as a .msg file in Outlook, but I could also import it into a simple Excel sheet.

Is there any way of taking a big list of external email addresses and importing them into SharePoint permissions groups?

Thanks

[#2]

I faced the same scenario. All I can figure out was to copy all the email address into Notepadd++/Excel for formatting, and then just copy and paste all the formatted email id's into the 'share site' invitation area and press 'share'. 

SharePoint will be auto-invitations for all the external users if you opt to 'Send an email invitation' at the time of sharing.

Note: Before sharing the site, make sure all the external domains are added to the sharing list through Admin Portal. Else, you will receive an error.

Hope this helps!