delete guest users

Question

Hi

I am going to tidy up our admin user portal, has a number of guest users. If I delete the users from the admin portal, will the following happen?

1. Remove specific guest access for libraries, folders and files for that guest user in SP?
2. Remove access to office 365 groups and therefore files. folders etc. in that group?
3. Remove their name from the 'shared with' column on SP libraries?
4. Remove their name from the admin users list?
5. Generally remove all instances for that user anywhere in office 365 or SP?

Answer 1

Hi Dave,

Below are my test results for your questions (I add external user as member to an Office 365 Group. Also share a folder with it to show the account in Shared with column. And then delete that external user in Office 365 admin center):

1. Yes. (External user account cannot access those former shared items)
2. Yes. (External cannot access the group and items in it. It's also removed from Group member)
3. No. (After delete the external users and wait for several hours, the account still in Shared with column. However, external account already lost the access for the test folder). For this part, please allow me more time to check the result.
4. If you remove external user from Office 365 admin center. They will be visible in Deleted Users section for 30 days.
5. Based on my understanding, the removed external user will lost all access to that tenant.

Some further info about external user and SharePoint Online could be helpful for you: How to remove users from SharePoint Online.

Best regards,

Tim

Answer 2

Hi Dave,

I think the situation is similar to the below one:

Share item with a user (external user in your scenario), and then that account appears in Shared With column. Remove that user's permission for the item (in your scenario, we directly remove the user from Office 365 admin center, this operation remove that external user's access for the item). User account will still appear in the Shared With column.

This behavior is explained in the following article.

The "Shared With" column displays users who no longer have access to a document in SharePoint Online

Thanks for your understanding.

Tim

Answer 3

Hi Tim

Thanks, that is good information. I note the same thing about the column of shared with. We had this issue before. I don't know why that feature works that way.