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The company I work for set up a portal through SharePoint Online. We invite external users to come and participate. We've had issues where users have forgotten their password or user name and want it to be reset. I was told by the other portal administrator that this can't be done since the external users are managed by Microsoft. I was also told we can't delete their old account and invite them again to the portal.

Is there any way around this? Thank you in advance!

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  • do you want to delete them or remove the permission from sharepoint online? – Waqas Sarwar MVP♦ Apr 15 '15 at 13:24
  • I would like to delete them, to add them again. – Steph Apr 15 '15 at 13:39
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You can't "delete" the account, as it's a Microsoft account (the account does not "exist" in your repository). You can remove and re-add the account, but will not accomplish anything. You could check to see what accounts were given access to the site and send the user their account name, if they have forgotten that. With the account name, they should be able to go through a recovery process with MS to get signed in again. Or, the user could create a new MS account and you could then give them access via the new account.

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  • So they can do this all through their Microsoft Live account? – Steph Apr 15 '15 at 14:18
  • Correct! Their account is a Live account, and so that's where it needs to be managed. (though, I've seen the same confusion where a user created a live account just to get access and then three months later has no memory of what account it was they created. You might be able to determine the account name for them, but then it's on them to recover the password). – Mike2500 Apr 15 '15 at 14:24
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You can delete them from SharePoint Online, but as these are external IDs so user manage it.

If you need to remove external users so that they no longer have access to sites that have been shared with them, you can do so by removing them from the list of external users in Office 365 Service Settings.

  • Go to Admin > Service Settings > sites and document sharing.
  • Click Remove individual external users.
  • Select the external users you want to remove, and then click Delete (the trash can icon).

http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/154/t/158686.aspx

or check this one

How to delete a problematic External User account from a SharePoint Online site Users List?

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  • In our O365 admin panel, we do not have a "sites and document sharing" option where you say it should be. Why is that? – Shaun Luttin Jan 12 '16 at 2:50
  • Thanks, the second link explained how to do it, and it works fine: basically use the GroupId=0 to remove users : <URL>/_layouts/15/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0 blogs.technet.com/b/french_sharepoint_gbs_blog/archive/2014/12/… – user52546 Mar 22 '16 at 14:15
  • if it helps you, please up vote it. – Waqas Sarwar MVP♦ Mar 22 '16 at 15:48
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A very good way to remove external users is with Powershell. Very often those that you removed from GUI still somehow remain. First check if there are any:

Get-SPOExternalUser -SiteUrl https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/SITENAME -PageSize 50

Then remove the unwanted one:

Remove-SPOExternalUser

Thanks to this you can:

  • re-invite the user if earlier his permissions were corrupt
  • assign different permission levels to the external user
  • remove external user's permissions for the site
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