SharePoint Online/OneDrive - "We couldnt find an exact match" for External Users (People Picker)

Question

Hello,

Our Office 365 tenant is encountering an error when a non-admin users (Global/SharePoint admin) try to add external users to SharePoint permission groups or share files/folders in onedrive by typing in the external user's email in the people picker. They receive the message "we couldnt find an exact match" and the share/send button is greyed out.

It's acting as if the people picker is only allowing the internal user to add external users who already exist on our tenant as guests. Up until about two weeks ago, the SharePoint site/OneDrive owner/admin/member would be able to send/add the external email address and it would create the guest user in our tenant once the external user accepts the invitation. The OneDrive "copy link" option does work currently if the internal user sets the folder/file to allow anonymous access (which we allow in our tenant settings).

The global admins and SharePoint admins in our tenant can still send the invitations normally to external users. They receive the message that the user is outside of our organization (normal), but the share/send button works correctly. So the issue is currently impacting all of our standard employee users.

We currently have our tenant, SharePoint, and Azure External sharing settings setup that users should be able to send external invitations correctly.

We have a ticket open with Microsoft support who have connected with us and double checked all of our sharing settings. They do not have an answer for us yet.

I'm posting this question in the hopes that someone may have some insight for us or to check if anyone has experienced this issue recently. The external sharing issue began around July 17th, 2023. The only other individuals I have seen online seem to also have been experiencing this issue in the last month or so: https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftWord/comments/14jrrb6/we_couldnt_find_an_exact_match/

Thank you,

Scott

Answer 1

Hi everyone,

A Microsoft support agent looking into our ticket suggested we try the following powershell command for our SPO tenant:

Set-SPOTenant -UseFindPeopleInPeoplePicker $false

This had previously been set to $true in our tenant and had never been modified.

After running the command the sharing appeared to start working again for certain sites, but not all of them. Freshly created sites appeared to be working but most of the older sites still received the "we couldn't find an exact match" error.

I ran another command at the tenant level:

Set-SPOTenant -ShowPeoplePickerSuggestionsForGuestUsers $true

This had previously been set to $false. I waited over the long weekend and this week our users appear to be able to share normally again without getting the errors in the people picker when trying to share.

In order to run these commands you will need the SharePoint Online Management shell for powershell: https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=35588

Run the SPO management shell and connect to your SPO tenant:

Connect-SPOService https://yourcompany-admin.sharepoint.com

A pop-up will appear asking you to sign in. After you sign in you can run the following command to check the SPO Tenant settings that are current for your environment:

Get-SPOTenant

After you check the settings you can try running the following two commands if they aren't already set for your tenant:

Set-SPOTenant -UseFindPeopleInPeoplePicker $false

Set-SPOTenant -ShowPeoplePickerSuggestionsForGuestUsers $true

Here is an article I found laying out the steps: https://helpcenter.elearningforce.com/hc/en-us/articles/6198432297501-Issue-with-the-LMS365-people-picker-not-finding-users

In the article they apply the -ShowPeoplePickerSuggestionsForGuestUsers attribute to a single SPO site they were having trouble with, but I applied it at the tenant level.

Hope this helps somebody!

Regards,

Scott

Answer 2

I had this exact issue with a couple of sites today. I found a fix that worked for us. Seems too simple to be true:

In Sharepoint Admin, select the site and go to the Settings tab. For this site, "External File Sharing" was set to existing guests rather than new and existing guests. When I changed it to new and existing, users were able to share. Hope this helps!

Answer 3

Hi Scott,

I hope to hear if/when this issue is fixed. I've been experiencing the same issues in a demo/test tenant for a couple of weeks. No changes on the tenant or site-collection level. It just refuses to share externally, even when the external users are added as external users in Azure AD.

Answer 4

Ran into this same issue; here's how I resolved:

1. Do all of the settings mentioned in OP (ignore Identities, I didn't need to touch that)
2. Go to Sharepoint Admin in M365, choose Active Sites, choose your site, click Settings and change the setting below.

It will still give you the warning on not having an exact match - but it will then allow you to share/send!

Answer 5

I have the exact same problem!