Deleting External Users From SharePoint Online

Question

The company I work for set up a portal through SharePoint Online. We invite external users to come and participate. We've had issues where users have forgotten their password or user name and want it to be reset. I was told by the other portal administrator that this can't be done since the external users are managed by Microsoft. I was also told we can't delete their old account and invite them again to the portal.

Is there any way around this? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

You can't "delete" the account, as it's a Microsoft account (the account does not "exist" in your repository). You can remove and re-add the account, but will not accomplish anything. You could check to see what accounts were given access to the site and send the user their account name, if they have forgotten that. With the account name, they should be able to go through a recovery process with MS to get signed in again. Or, the user could create a new MS account and you could then give them access via the new account.

Answer 2

You can delete them from SharePoint Online, but as these are external IDs so user manage it.

If you need to remove external users so that they no longer have access to sites that have been shared with them, you can do so by removing them from the list of external users in Office 365 Service Settings.

• Go to Admin > Service Settings > sites and document sharing.
• Click Remove individual external users.
• Select the external users you want to remove, and then click Delete (the trash can icon).

http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/154/t/158686.aspx

or check this one

How to delete a problematic External User account from a SharePoint Online site Users List?

Answer 3

A very good way to remove external users is with Powershell. Very often those that you removed from GUI still somehow remain. First check if there are any:

Get-SPOExternalUser -SiteUrl https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/SITENAME -PageSize 50

Then remove the unwanted one:

Remove-SPOExternalUser

Thanks to this you can:

• re-invite the user if earlier his permissions were corrupt
• assign different permission levels to the external user
• remove external user's permissions for the site