SharePoint Online (Microsoft 365) - Notification of external user invitation acceptance

Question

Just wondering if there is any way to manage the SharePoint Online external invitation system on a more granular level? The out of the box system where you go to Site Actions > Share Site seems very "fire and forget" and doesn't seem to offer the functionality we need.

Specifically we would like to do the following:-

• Allow invitations into specific groups: Instead of just being able to invite users to the Visitors or Members groups, is there any way I can specify other groups already setup?
• View which invites have been sent out, with the ability to cancel them.
• Be alerted once a user has accepted their invite. Ideally we would like this to automatically start a workflow.

The problem we have is that we will be inviting several different user types, which will be distinguished by the group we assign them. At the moment we can invite them, and once they have accepted their invite we can assign them to the appropriate group. The problem is that they would get their invite, but we would not know that they have accepted so we can assign them to their appropriate group (without manually checking the user list for the site). They would then login to the system, but would not be able to access the appropriate lists and document libraries as they are not yet members of the correct group.

Any advice appreciated.

Answer 1

Allow invitations into specific groups: Instead of just being able to invite users to the Visitors or Members groups, is there any way I can specify other groups already setup?

I've worked this one out: If you go into Site Actions > Site Settings > People and Groups and click the group you would like to invite people into, you can then click Settings > Make Default Group. This causes this group to be available in Site Actions > Share Site.

A bit cumbersome, but by changing the default group before sending the invites seems to work. This is confirmed by Share Site showing the group name instead of Members. I've done a quick test, and if multiple invites are sent out to different groups they seem to be assigned correctly. My test was delayed a little by SharePoint Online giving an error when an invitation was accepted, but it seems to be working now after my support request.