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.

Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com