Understanding External Users in SharePoint Online

The ability to share your SharePoint sites and documents with people outside your organization is a very compelling capability in SharePoint Online. You are allowed up to 500 unique external users per month on the P-plans, and 10,000 for the M and E plans at no cost.

The people outside your organization are called External Users. External Users means users that are not either your or your affiliates’ employees, or your or your affiliates’ onsite contractors or onsite agents.

Over the years I've had so many questions as to what an external user can or can not do in SharePoint Online.

Here is a couple of the things they can do (have the rights to)

• External users can use Office Web Apps for viewing and editing documents. If your plan includes Office Pro Plus, they will not have the licenses to install the desktop version of Office on their own computers.
• External users inherit the use rights of the Office 365 customer who is inviting them to collaborate on a site. That is, if an organization purchases an E3 Enterprise plan, and builds a site that uses enterprise features, the external user is granted rights to use and/or view the enterprise features within the site collection they are invited to.
• An external user can perform tasks on a site consistent with the permission level that they are assigned. For example, if you add an external user to the Members group, they will have Edit permissions and they will be able to add, edit and delete lists; they will also be able to view, add, update and delete list items and documents.
• External users will be able to see other types of content on sites. For example, they can navigate to different subsites within the site collection to which they were invited. They will also be able to do things like view site feeds.

And here is a couple of the thing they cannot do (do not have the rights to)

• External users cannot create their own personal sites (what used to be referred to as My Sites). This means that they do not have their own SkyDrive Pro document library.
• External users cannot see the company-wide newsfeed. They also cannot edit their own profile, change their photo, or see aggregated tasks.
• External users do not add quota to the overall tenant storage pool (this is determined by licensed users only).
• External users cannot be an administrator for a site collection. However, you can designate an external user as a designer for your Public Website. This restriction also does not apply to scenarios where you have hired a partner to help you manage Office 365.
• By default, external users cannot access the Search Center and will not be able to execute searches against “everything” (cross site collection search)

Read more here.

 

Note - the Online Services Use Rights and the Product Use Rights is the authoritative documents in use rights.

See also

• SharePoint Online: software boundaries and limits - link

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  thanks

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  If you need to identify yourself to access content on a SharePoint Server you need a CAL, as far as I know. The Product Use Rights document is authorities on access rights.

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2013
  great post! such a kind information !

• Anonymous
  June 28, 2013
  Hi, Thanks for this post! Is external users feature is available with an on premise server ? Thanks !

• Anonymous
  October 06, 2013
  great post clear alot of thing. I have question regarding anonymous access. I want a blog site and want when user find my blog in bing search, he will access without login as anonymous. Is it possible?

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  SP2013 on-premises server license includes external user access rights. ie. no SP CALs required. Please make sure you have correct licensing on SQL and Windows Server side though.

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2014
  Hi JesperCould you please clarify if the External User can create his own document and upload it?My email rickie@digitalarmour.com.au - will appreciate if you could kindly email this as I am not generally on this blog.ThanksRickie

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2014
  I have a consultant whom was able to change his profile photo as an external user. Is this still considered a limitation? I am not sure that it is...

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2014
  I have a question that maybe you can respond (i hope).
  If i give an external user modify permission on 1 file, how can i avoid the external user to share the very same document to ohter people? I dont want them to be able to share the document. I just want them to edit it.
  

• Anonymous
  October 06, 2014
  What permissions group are they added to on a typical subsite if you simply click the Share button and add them that way? Is it the External Users group or the Visitors?

• Anonymous
  March 31, 2015
  Read more HERE....hyper link is broken. Can you please provide correct link?
  
  I assume, this is still applicable. Can we send invite to external users having GMAIL id? Which all are valid ID's?

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2015
  Can external users interact with the site feed (comment or like)? Currently my external user gets the error "Something went wrong. We're unable to like this post for you right now".
  Thanks in advance :)

• Anonymous
  September 21, 2017
  Awesome! Its in fact remarkable post, I have got much clear idea regarding from this piece of writing.