I work for a company and we team with other companies to do a lot of work for the Government and Military.  We have started using the Office 365/SharePoint versus buying our own SharePoint onsite server.  We are trying to put together a 'Document Workspace' site that we can post documents and edit them between the two companies.  All of the employees at our company have the hotmail address to log onto our SharePoint pages.  The other company, do to security/firewall issues cannot access our SharePoint site that they been invited to. (Email back from company: The 'company' firewall won’t give us access to Hotmail, which seems to be required to gain access to your SharePoint  server.) The other company can give us access to their SharePoint workspace on their 'Internal SharePoint site'.

How can I get other users company address access to our sharepoint site without having them link to Hotmail?

Thanks

Hello smansberger,

This is Justin with Microsoft Office 365 Sharepoint Support.  Thanks for posting your question.

Unfortunately, you must use a Live ID to login with the external users feature.  Does the company block all Live ID traffic or just Hotmail?  You could send an invite to the work email (ex. joe@company.gov) and then associate that with a Live ID by going to https://idsignup.live.com and selecting 'Use existing email address'.  If they are unable to get here at the workplace, perhaps you could associate it on another computer and login with these credentials from that point forward.  For more information about this feature, check out the links below.  Let us know your progress.

Small Business: http://office.microsoft.com/redir/HA101850586.aspx

Enterprise:  http://office.microsoft.com/redir/HA102476183.aspx

Thanks and Regards,

Justin Ronan
Microsoft Office 365 Sharepoint

Hello,

I'm hearing that the blocking of login.live.com is pretty common in both 'highly secure' companies and government websites.   With this in mind, is the team discussing setting up alternate access to the sign-in for sharepoint online and office 365 on another authentication server?

Without this, I fear that we cannot use SharePoint online as a portal website for sharing information with any government entities, which would SEVERELY limit the use of the site, and basically make SharePoint online useless to us.

Currently, because of this problem, we are looking to set up an internal sharepoint site, because there is no other choice, even though this site will have quite a few limitations compared to SharePoint online.

Does the Office 365 team have any suggestions for us: in setting up a sharepoint portal on Office 365 that these collaborators may use without the problem?

Personally, I don't believe in the practice of blocking entire domains, but this usage is widespread.  "Experts" on webpages have recommended people block login.live.com and many companies have adopted the practice.   I fear that a fix to the access problem is NOT coming by requesting that the practice be changed, especially for government agencies.

However, can the team recommend a different blocking behavior for the companies and agencies blocking login.live.com that will provide them blocking of Hotmail, but NOT block access to sharepoint online because of the authentication page?

Reply here or PM me ....

-thanks

-e