Office 365 – SharePoint – Sharing sites, lists or documents with external people

Sharing sites, lists or documents with external people is easy in office 365. A couple of tick boxes to click and off you go.

Sometimes however it’s not that easy.

I just shared a site with someone externally where the email address was registered with Microsoft. So this could be any account but in my case something like  …@live.co.uk

Then I tried sharing with MrX@mycustomer.onmicrosoft.com and this didn’t work or at least the external user didn’t appear in my permissions overview. Also within my active users I couldn’t see the external user.

A couple of potential issues:

1. MrX@mycustomer.onmicrosoft.com  didn’t have a mailbox connected to it
2. It takes a while for onmicrosoft users to be recognized by the permissioning engine. My customer only just created the user account

So we gave MrX a mailbox to resolve issue 1.

When I checked the day after my external user appeared and the problem was resolved.