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Introducing guest access for Office 365 Groups

Sometimes you need to work closely with customers, partners, suppliers or consultants outside of your organization, and you need collaboration tools to make this possible. Today, we are pleased to announce the new guest access feature for Office 365 Groups—the group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365. The new guest access feature gives you the ability to include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group.

We are rolling out guest access functionality in phases. Starting today, group owners can add guests to a group in Outlook on the web. Once added, guests receive a welcome email, are granted access to group files in SharePoint Online, begin receiving email messages and calendar invites sent to the group, and can send messages to the group. They also have automatic access to cloud-based file attachments. Guests have the option to leave the group at any time and visual indicators remind all members of guest participation in the group across all Outlook experiences.

Office Groups GIF

Guest access works for any email accounts including corporate and consumer domains (such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com). If the guest email identity is associated with a Microsoft account (such as Office 365 or Outlook.com accounts, for instance), the user is directed to a sign-in page to identify themselves. If the guest doesn’t have a Microsoft account, they will be directed to a sign-up page to create an account.

Learn more

Get the latest on Office 365 Groups at Microsoft Ignite

Hear more about guest access in Office 365 Groups at the “Collaborate outside of the firewall with Office 365 Groups” session at the Microsoft Ignite event, September 26–30 in Atlanta. Sessions will be available online following the event. See our Sway for a complete list of Office 365 Groups sessions at the event.

—Christophe Fiessinger, @cfiessinger, senior program manager for the Office 365 Groups team