Activating External Users for SharePoint Online

Being very excited about Office 365 going live this week, I decided to share the experience with some of my clients by setting up SharePoint sites for mutual collaboration on our Dynamics CRM projects, much as I have done at previous employers. Setting up the site collections, including customizing the templates and the presentation schemes, was delightfully straightforward … until. When I tried to share the sites with my external clients I kept getting a message that invitations to external users were not enabled. I knew that this had to be a two step process, but figuring out how to accomplish the second step required several hours and finally a call to the SharePoint Online support team. In the interests of saving the reader a call to the support desk, here are the steps for activating external users for SharePoint Online.

Step 1 – Manage External Users

Start by logging into the SharePoint Online Administration Center. Click the “Settings” button on the ribbon bar, and select “Manage External Users”.

On the External Users dialog, select “Allow” and click “Save”.

This will enable all of your site collections to be configured to allow external users to be invited to the site. The next step is of course …

Step 2 – Activating External Users for the Site Collection

Start this step by navigating to the target site collection. Once there, select the “Site Actions” menu and click on the “Site Settings” menu item.

So far, so good, but here is the part that buried me. Click on the “Site collection features” link under “Site Collection Administration”. Sehr einfach, nicht wahr?

Maybe I’m a post (it has been posited), but I was not intuitive enough to figure this out on my own, hence the two hours of searching and the call to Microsoft.

Once here however, it is smooth sailing. Just click the “Activate” button next to “External user invitations” to activate this feature, and you are off and running.

On a related note, the response from the SharePoint Online team was timely, knowledgeable, and thorough. Thanks, Joshua Lense, for the outstanding support.