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Our latest Grid User Post comes from Corey Roth.
One of the coolest features unique to SharePoint Online is the ability to share sites with external users. I’ve noticed the functionality was there throughout the beta but I believe I hadn’t actually been able to get it to work until GA. Even then, it took checking a number of settings before I could actually get it to work. You can share content with external users by using the new Share Site menu item in the Site Actions menu. When you start with a new out-of-the-cloud site collection, you will get a screen that looks like this.
Notice the key text on the screen:
Invitations to users outside your organization are currently disabled.
To enable this, there are a few things to check. First go to Tenant administration. Your URL is usually something like https://mydomain-admin.sharepoint.com. Go to the Manage Site Collections page and click Settings –> Manage External Users. Make sure you don’t have any site collections selected otherwise Settings will be disabled. Make sure the Allow radio button is selected. It is more than likely set to this by default.
Once you have confirmed this setting, go back to the root site of your site collection and go to Site Settings and then Site Collection Features. Here you will want to enable the feature External User Invitations.
Now, if you go back to the Share Site menu in Site Actions, you will now be able to enter E-mail addresses and the window will no longer have the warning about invitations being disabled.
I noticed it usually takes a few minutes for the E-mail to show up so be patient. When the E-mail arrives, you will see something like this giving the user a link to click on to join.
Clicking on the link takes the user to a page prompting them to login. They must use a Windows Live or Microsoft Online Services ID to login.
One thing to note is that the E-mail address associated with the Windows Live Id does not have to be the same as the E-mail you sent the user.
Don’t bother E-mailing me at that address, I never check it. As an administrator, you can now also manage this user in the Site Permissions page like any other user.
At this point, it seems like the user can do whatever they need to on the site with the users you provided. I’m not really sure how the licensing works in this scenario. These users don’t show up in the licensing page so I guess you don’t have to license them. Maybe an SPO licensing expert will chime in. :) There may also be additional limitations that I have yet to discover. If you find some be sure and share them with us.
1 out of 1 people found this post helpful.
Nice article!
This did not work for me. When the user tries to connect to the site they get an error saying "Access denied ... You are not a member of the site". If I then go and try to add the user to the Visitors group it doesn't let me add the account because it does not recoginse the user.
Many forums are missing one critical step of the external users process. Check out this video with step-by-step instructions on How to Add External Users to SharePoint. www.youtube.com/watch
Hope I can help!
For plan P1 dont work
Unfortunately, the decision to force Live authentication by requring MS hotmail or online services accounts is a whopping mistake. This descends to the level of 'google docs' and just doesn't work in a business setting. Requring someome to open a new account with a new email requiring personal information just to share files is both embarrasing and the biggest turnoff imaginable. I've hade several clients, including lawyers, refuse to go through this step simply to share files with my company. Instead I've had to set up a separate hosted sharepoint site that is not purposefully crippled like Office 365.
Fantastic article!! This needs to be bookmarked for Office 365 Admin 101 material.
There are many Intranets solutions on the market, however if you are looking for a solid SharePoint based Intranet solution, check out SharePoint Implementeds’ product. I think it’s the best solution out for the price. They seem to have put a lot of thought into usability and filling in gaps that you would not know exsist in sharepoint until you start your implementation.
They offer a turnkey solution which provides a custom Home Site, Department Sites and Project Sites, installation, configuration and training all under $10,000 with source code.
One thing that I would love to see that they dont have now is a hosted solution
You can get more details at sharepointimplemented.com/AwesomeIntranetGorilla.html
I love this website is great aswell.
It doesn't work with a liveID liked to your own domain.
I feel , Currently it works only with hotmail IDs. iWe can send invites to any domain email account but when at the login time only hotmail accounts work.
I agree with Scott above. In establishing a business extranet, external users/partners do not want to define a new user ID/email address. Plus there may be alerts that you want to send to them from the site collection. These of course will go to the hotmail/live email address (which they won't be checking). BIG mistake microsoft! Unfortunately this will force me to do either an on-premise implementation of SharePoint or look at a VPN connected hosted solution. Hopefully Exchange 2010 doesn't have these same "gotcha's"!
Office 365 has limitations but it is cheap. It does the basic SharePoint things but not the clever ones. I have struggled trying to get a Site to 'Save As Site Template'.
Please take a look at my article on 10 Rules of SharePoint Navigation to get some clues though on how to really bring it to life. http://aboutsharepoint.com
Office 365: Share Sharepoint Sites with external users
I read somewhere that Microsoft was expected - 2nd week in April - to "broaden" what types of email accounts were valid?
Is it STILL strictly LiveID and HotMail accounts only?
Thanks,
Scott