Allow external non-Office 365 Business users to sync OneDrive Shares
Please allow external users who don't have a OneDrive for Business account (i.e., users with a personal OneDrive account only) to sync shared folders to their local computers. We can already grant edit access to external, personal users, which works fine through a web browser. Also, external users with O365 business accounts can sync our shares. But the combination is not possible: external personal users can't sync. This is FORCING us to drop OneDrive and go back to DropBox, which supports this seamlessly even in their free service.
While better not to constrain the size/amount of syncable files based on the external user's available personal OneDrive space, that would be an acceptable limitation. At least make it possible to sync if the user has sufficient space remaining in their personal OneDrive.
GraniteStateColin
shared this idea
7 comments
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Adrian
commented
As the IT manager for a small organisation who has just migrated from Dropbox to OneDrive. This looks like a key product deficiency. We are able to share a folder for edit access with an external consultant, which occurs regularly, however the only access they get is through a web browser. They need to download the files and upload them again when they've finished working with them offline - plenty of these files need to be manipulated in third party applications.
It would be significantly better if there was a "guest OneDrive" method where OneDrive will allow them to sync the data that has been shared with them from a OneDrive for Business tenant to their Microsoft account, either personal or business. -
Anonymous
commented
I agree - some people who we share with are small business (1-3 people) who just use personal (non-business) one drive accounts. Thy need to be able to sync to the business one drive.
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Anonymous
commented
Please consider adding this functionality. I believe we are going to go back to Dropbox if this cannot be implemented. It was very easy in Dropbox to share with anyone and instantly be able to collaborate on documents.
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Scott Gulick
commented
Please add this functionality, we built a SharePoint site for our operation with External users. There are external users asking us to scrap our SharePoint site in favor of Google Drive as it has this functionality.
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GraniteStateColin
commented
Just to add to my original post: our work-around that we discovered after I posted this has been to add non-licensed accounts to our O365 tenant. This doesn't cost anything and gives users full access via the MS account in our tenant. It's not ideal, requires the user to have a second MS account which can be confusing for users compared with just letting them "Sync" and using their existing personal MS account, but it's a viable solution. Good enough that this is no longer our top concern with OneDrive (but would still love to have this feature working).
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Josh
commented
Business are already working around this with Free-Tenants and Sharing Links.
Just implement this feature already... -
Anonymous
commented
This is definitely an essential feature - all existing Office users who need this will have to go to Google or Dropbox.
