How to Get SharePoint Online External Users Report in Microsoft 365

To collaborate with external users in Microsoft SharePoint, you must add them to your desired site. Follow the steps below to add external users to a SharePoint site.

When the site owner sends an invitation, the end user receives it along with the site URL. Then they can click the link and access the site.

• Here you can get entire details of the created sharing invitation such as shared item, invited external user, who invited, and other details related to the invitation.
• To view the sharing invitation created for a specific resource, apply easy filters for the Shared Item property.

External users require SharePoint Online permissions to access the respective site, folder, file, or list. However, it is necessary to grant the right level of permissions to avoid any accidental or intentional sensitive data loss in your organization.

You can grant privileges such as Read, Edit, and Full control, based on the external user's requirements for that specific site or file.

Set the guest permission levels, while you invite or share the SharePoint site with external users. Follow the steps below to select the permission level for external users.

Yes, even if the external users do not have a Microsoft account, they can access and seamlessly collaborate on shared files and folders using a verification code sent to their email ID. However, this method is applicable only when "Anyone" links are not set in your organization.

However, when multi-factor authentication is configured with Conditional Access policies, non-Microsoft users cannot access the files shared with them. Furthermore, you cannot share a SharePoint site with users without a Microsoft account.

Note: If you share files using "Anyone" links, users without a Microsoft account can access them directly without requiring a verification code.

When you are unable to share a SharePoint site with external users, it is important to ensure that your SharePoint Online is configured to allow access for external users. If it is not enabled, you can enable external sharing in the ways below.

Additionally, you have the option to configure additional external sharing settings, including limiting sharing to specific domains, allowing external sharing by users from specific security groups, and establishing a guest expiration policy in SharePoint Online.

Connect-SPOService -Url <https://yourtenantname-admin.sharepoint.com>

Set-SPOSite -Identity <https://yourtenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/yoursite> -SharingCapability ExternalUserAndGuestSharing

• You can directly click on the "Schedule this report now" icon to receive the report in different time frames to your mailbox.
• Pro Tip: Disable external sharing for sites with sensitive information and choose other permission levels for less confidential sites.

Monitor the external users in your organization's SharePoint sites to ensure secure collaboration across organizational boundaries. You can retrieve the list of external users in SharePoint Online using the following methods.

Verifying the presence of external users from the SharePoint admin center can be challenging, as it requires navigating to each site to identify them.

• Click the "Preview and Deploy" to create the alert policy.
• This default alert policy triggers an alert when the number of SharePoint external sharing invites for the same 'site' in a day increases by at least 5% over the same day of the previous week.
• Pro Tip: You can modify the alert policy based on specific properties using Scope by navigating to the Alerts tab of the AdminDroid portal.

You can effectively manage external users in SharePoint Online by adding and removing them, enabling expiration policies, managing permissions, and monitoring their activity. It ensures proper access control of external users and prevents attacks that may occur due to external sharing within your Microsoft 365 environment.

Remove unnecessary external users in SharePoint Online

If you don’t require specific external users for a site, you can remove them from SharePoint Online or restrict the access given to them.
To remove external users from SharePoint Online, follow the steps below.

Run the following cmdlets to remove external users from SharePoint Online using PowerShell.

Connect-SPOService -Url <https://yourtenantname-admin.sharepoint.com>

$user = Get-SPOExternalUser -Filter <External user’s UPN>
Remove-SPOExternalUser -UniqueIDs @($user.UniqueId) -Confirm:$true

Note: Your organizational members may see the username of the removed external user in the membership dialogue box. Once removed, these external users cannot sign-in or access any of your organization’s resources.

Yes, you can set an expiration policy for external users which is used to limit the number of days the visitors can access it. Users' access to the site expires when it reaches the limit mentioned in the policy.

To manage guest expiration policy for a SharePoint site,

What is SharePoint Online external sharing time limit? The minimum period you can specify for guest access is 30 days while the maximum is 730 days.

To mitigate the risk of data loss and other security breaches, admins must monitor the activities of external users with whom the SPO content was shared. To audit SharePoint Online external sharing activities, follow the steps below.

• To view the files shared to external users via SharePoint Online, apply easy filters for the Workload property.
• You can also download or export the report in the format you need by clicking the download icon present at the top right corner.