Microsoft Copilot
Glossary
External sharing and guest access
External sharing and guest access are the Microsoft 365 capabilities that let people outside an organization, such as partners, contractors and customers, open files and collaborate in Teams, SharePoint sites and OneDrive.
Also known as: external access, guest access, external collaboration, external sharing
How outsiders get in
There are several routes. A guest account is invited into the directory and added to Teams, groups or sites. A sharing link can grant access to a file or folder, in some configurations without any sign-in. Shared channels in Teams let members of another tenant join a single channel. Each route has its own settings at tenant, site and Team level.
What goes wrong
Guests are invited for a project and never removed. Invitations stay unaccepted for months. Files are shared with personal email addresses. Some groups even end up with external owners. None of this is visible from a single admin page, so external access tends to grow until an audit or an incident forces a review.
Where Rencore fits
Rencore lists external users and their email domains and flags invitations pending for months, inactive external users, Teams and groups with external users, groups with external owners, shared channels with external access and files shared with external users. An automation disables inactive external accounts, and OneDrive owners get reminders about their externally shared files.
Learn more: Microsoft 365 external access
