Office 365 – SharePoint online Extranet Invites

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Office 365 – SharePoint online Extranet Invites

The office 365 SharePoint online has Extranet feature to invite external people (without any online license) to access your site and work on it ( as Visitor or as contributor etc) . By default you get 50 such users invites free and you can opt for more if required by paying very little amount as compared to regular online SharePoint licenses. For this you have to send invite to people on their live email account and give them permissions using their live email account for example you can give permissions to externaluser@hotnmail.com and send him email . once he receives email , he can click on link in the email and logon to online site using his live email account and will be able to access

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Open the Portal.microsoftonline.com using admin credentials and click on Manage under SharePoint online

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Click on Manage Site collections

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Select the Site collection on which you want to give access to external users

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lick on Settings and select Manager External Users: Allow the access to external users in popup dialog

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Goto Site – Actions – Find External users permissions- Click on that

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Type in the external users live email accounts, type a message to be sent in email and click Ok

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Go and check the external live meeting account email … you would have received an email from Tenant Administrator of Online Account . open it . it will have a link to external SharePoint site and button to accept the invitation. Click on Invitation. It will open the browser for logon to online account where you have to provide your live account email address . if you are already logged into your live account , it may not ask for credentials and will log you on to the site directly.

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The above screen shot shows how the logon service responds when you type in your Hotmail account emailid for logging into online portal site of Office 365

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Also refer to : https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/share-a-site-with-external-users-HA102476183.aspx

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    You are not able to see Manage external users as iT now GA and the post is talking about Beta version where the option was visible , in GA you just need to enable the Feature in site colection features "External users Invitation"

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    This feature is only for enterprise plans and not for small business

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Public facing site is html based site so whatever you wnat to do can be done through html and not designer

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Yes it works even if you have federated AD environment .......... Yes it requires a Liveid (hotmail.com or live.com) to access the extranet site as Office 365 has Federation setup with Microsoft Liveid.

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2011
    Can I customize the branding of the extranet and its login page?

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2011
    Is this feature only available to enterprise customers ?? I have a small business portal and don't see "Manager External Users" in my site settings.

  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2011
    Couple of questons of this:-

  1. Does this work the same even if you have federated AD setups?  
  2. Will it only work if extranet user has a windows live account?

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2011
    After allowing external users access, do you have to go and activate External users Invitation site features? I don't have Enterprise account and don't see the options of Manage External Users but I am able to invite users without any problem. You see see the steps: virtualizesharepoint.com/.../adding-and-inviting-external-users-to-sharepoint-online-sites

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2011
    I don't think anyone out there using beta verson for produciton.

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2011
    I read somewhere that office web apps are in view only mode for External users. Is it the same for Form Server? How about Access services? Thanks

  • Anonymous
    February 03, 2012
    The extranet feature does not allow users with Live IDs connected to gmail, yahoo, or other domains to access a SharePoint site.  Only those users with hotmail.com or live.com domain email addresses can access a SharePoint site using the extranet features.  This makes the extranet capabilities much less useful and attractive.  Currently there is no set date for resolving this issue.

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2012
    Do you know what the small amount is for over 50 external users?