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Question

We have invited an external user to a SharePoint Online sub-site.

  1. We sent the invite to [email protected] non-MSFT account.
  2. The user accepted the invite via her [email protected] MSFT account.

That was all good.

The user now needs to be able to sign in with her [email protected] MSFT account. The problem is that we are unable to send a new invite to the user, without that invite already being associated with a MSFT account.

We have tried to completely delete the external user from our SharePoint and O365 system before sending a new invite. Unfortunately, the new invite goes directly to the MSFT sign-in page instead of cuing the user to associate a new MSFT account.

There are the locations from which we have tried to completely delete the users.

  1. Active Users portal.office.com > Users > Active Users.
  2. User Profiles Admin > SharePoint > User Profiles > Manage User Profiles > Search > i:0#.f|membership
  3. Active Directory portal.office.com > Admin > Azure AD
  4. SpoExternalUser PowerShell > Get-SPOExternalUser –PageSize 50
  5. SpoUser PowerShell > Get-SpoUser for all sites (footnote 1)
  6. MsolUser PowerShell > Get-MsolUser

In the above locations, there are some external users listed, though the problematic external user is NOT listed. Why cannot we invite her back to our organization?

Footnotes

1 Get-SpoUser for all Sites

Get-SPOsite | 
   Select -ExpandProperty url | 
   % { Get-SpoUser -Site $_ | Select -ExpandProperty LoginName } | 
   ? { $_ -like "*@*" } | 
   Get-Unique

References

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1 Answer 1

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You can do this through PowerShell:

  1. Remove-SPOUser -Site ... -LoginName name_domain#ext#@yourdomain.com.

This removes the user from the site collection. If he's in more than one site collection, you need to repeat it for every site collection. If you're unsure on the format of the login name, use get-spouser to see the login names and try to find the specific user.

  1. $user = Get-SPOExternalUser -Filter [email protected]

  2. Remove-SPOExternalUser -UniqueIDs @($user.UniqueId)

This removes the external user from the tenant. The same as you could do trough the admin interface.

If you want to be sure you could always check the User Profile Application and see if the user still has a profile. If so, remove that as well.

This has always worked for me so far. As long as you find the right email address which the user used to accept the invite. An that could be a bit confusing sometimes.

If this doesn't work, open a support ticket in your admin portal. They returned a call to me within two hours and fixed my issue and were able to explain really well the underlying problems.

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  • One thought I had after this post is that you probably need to check the mysites as well for this external users.
    – Oak3
    Jan 13, 2016 at 6:28

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