External Sharing in SharePoint and OneDrive is changing: What You Need to Know

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In an ongoing effort to create a more secure environment by default, Microsoft is introducing an important security update that will affect how external users access content shared through SharePoint and OneDrive. Starting July 1, 2025, any links shared with external users before your organization enabled Microsoft Entra B2B integration will no longer work. This change applies to all organizations that have already enabled or will enable SharePoint and OneDrive integration with Microsoft Entra B2B (Most organizations I have looked into so far). External users trying to use old links will see an error message saying the organization has updated its guest access settings. To regain access, the content must be reshared. Highlights of how the change affects organizations who have enabled B2B: All external sharing will require guest registration. External users must be added as guests in your Microsoft Entra directory. Access will be managed through Microsoft Entra B2B Invitation Manager. T...

Microsoft Teams Guest Access for all (Not just MSA)

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A truly collaborative platform

For a collaboration tool to be truly collaborative, it needs to support not only most kind of devices but it should also be able to include users from across the globe. For some time now, Slack and Google hangout have kind of ruled this space, by being able to bring people together based on a simple e-mail address, and not making it a prerequisite to be a subscriber of their services.

Microsoft Teams first version of Guest Access had the limitation of only being able to invite other users from companies who also were users of Office 365.

Their second version expanded this functionality to users with a so called MFA (much like Skype Consumer federation was limited to users with a "Microsoft" account).

But all that is gone now. It was just announced that the support for all kinds of guest access into Teams will be supported, and here is quick glance at how it looks.

Prepare the tenant

Guest access is controlled by the Admin of the tenant, and in order for it to work, the administrator needs to set the propper rights and licencing in the portal. This is quite easy done like this:
  • Click Settings
  • Click Services & Add-ins
  • Select "Microsoft Teams"
  • Select "Settings by user/license type"
  • Select "Guest" in the drop down list
  • Verify the option is set to "On"


Invite the user

Once the settings are implemented (Note: the setting is global), users may invite guest by entering an email address in the "add member" dialog:


This will send an email to your contact, which will contain a link to initiate the participation.




After the initial sign in, the user may choose download the client or participate in the web browser of his or her choice, and participate fully with everyone in the team.

I have been playing around with this for a while, and I see this as a great development of Teams, strengthening it's position in the market.