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Why does Office 365 still make it so difficult to work with outside clients, partners, etc?

Anonymous
2020-06-24T20:54:07+00:00

I have started a new business and chose Office 365 because most of my customers would need access to Office Documents (Word, Excel, etc.), but communicating with customers (many of them also Office 365 customers) using teams, sharing documents with Sharepoint, and other productivity tools is next to impossible and incredibly frustrating!

As an example, I was using my gmail account for primary correspondence with a freelancer prior to starting my company. He created a guest account for me using my gmail email which gets turned into some VERY painful id for his instance like [myemail]_gmail.com#EXT#@hisdomain.onmicrosoft.com

  • this is not my "account" for his office 365 world. This ignores the fact that I already have my own Microsoft account, it then prevented me from unlinking that login from his business and I struggle to regain full control of the Microsoft account I created on my own using my gmail email.

For my own business, I attempted to invite a friend to test if I would be able to invite people to Microsoft Teams for chats during our projects together. I now have 2 different accounts for my friend on Office 365 through Azure AD (one 'guest' using the email he would prefer [user]@gmail.com which he uses for his own office 365 subscription) and another as an 'unlicensed' user [user]_gmail.com@[mycompany].onmicrosoft.com. The real painful part of this is that he cannot use either account to get back into Teams to speak with me...

I REALLY want to keep using Microsoft products, but this is no longer excusable. I can pay the same price per year for email, slack, and another cloud storage provider that will make adding clients to my tools far easier than this. How can Microsoft claim to support small business when their competition is making small business workflows so much easier?!?

EDIT: I have finally been able to connect an external guest to Microsoft Teams! I will try to write up the steps I needed to take so that I will be able to help others in the future, but also so that I can help the next person join more easily. I will also document an 'on-boarding' external users document to see if that will help them use Teams more easily.

Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams for business | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-09-29T11:15:46+00:00

    I am equally so annoyed by the entire process of accessing Microsoft Office. Why are you making it SOOOOO complicated? Is it in the name of money? I bought my Microsoft Office outright yet I still have to log in and out, then add a code to verify - EVERY DAY. This does not make business sense for me. I am a startup. I have no secrets to hide. You should give your customers better login options.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-06-24T21:48:43+00:00

    I am quite sure that I am confusing myself, but it's not because of all the accounts I have have for myself. It is very common for people to have multiple emails (for different businesses or organizations they are a part of). I also have my own domain for this business that I am trying to run using Office 365. My guest accounts (my clients) should be expected to have their own email which I can grant access to resources hosted by my business.

    I can appreciate that you might ignore emails from free hosts, but that isn't the challenge I am facing here. I want to know that inviting a client to participate in projects using Microsoft products will not have to jump through painful steps of an on-boarding process. Most of my work will not be completed strictly through and I am not wanting to spend even more money for individual service providers (Slack, Zoom, Asana, etc).

    If Microsoft is trying to offer solutions to help small businesses complete their work can we make it easier to use the tools?

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-06-24T21:34:14+00:00

    Sounds like you are just confusing yourself with all the various accounts you and others have created for you.

    If you want to reduce that confusion, buy a domain name and apply it to your Office 365 Business tenant. It would look better from a business standpoint than having business email come via a gmail address. I know I ignore spam emails from GMail (or Hotmail, or Outlook, etc) accounts as I know they aren't serious about being a business.

    You'll have much better success with your own domain then trying to leverage gmail or any of the other accounts you mention.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-06-25T06:36:52+00:00

    Hi Ryan,

    Thank you for posting your issue on Microsoft Community. However, I have notice that you have edited your initial post to update the information “I have finally been able to connect an external guest to Microsoft Teams!”

    If you have any further query or need help, please do not hesitate to contact us.

    Best regards,

    Shyamal

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