Ulysses Ludwig’Blog

Problem

Share Office365 site with an External user. External user follows the invite link and accepts the invite only to be prompted with “Invalid Partner ID” or, if they’ve already accepted an invitation and accessed the site briefly, “We’re sorry, but [email protected] can’t be found in the pdq.sharepoint.com directory”.

Error Details

Issue Type: Partner User Invalid

We’re sorry, but [email protected] can’t be found in the directory. Please try again later, while we try to automatically fix this for you.

Possible Causes

Keep in mind that there are two types of Microsoft accounts (it appears that users can maintain both accounts with one email address)

Organizational Account is account where the customer manages their own security and account policies.

Microsoft Account is unmanaged and allows users may use their personal email addresses such as @gmail or @yahoo.

There are obvious kinks in the armor here with respect to Office365, the security therein, and IRM (information rights management). Microsoft is teetering on a slippery slope where personal and business can be easily intermingled and has somewhat addressed the issue by allowing trusted organizations to be configured within the Office365 admin console. We’ve actually had to develop a special app for one customer to allow only specific whitelisted URLs that match that of particular vendor URLs because not all of their customers are utilizing Office365 – because they don’t use office365 it is not possible to configure a trust.

My initial thoughts here are that one of the following issues are occurring

1. The user accepted the Office365 invitation from a managed Office 365 account. The account may not be synched fully, or fully licensed, on Office365. If this is an issue it is likely to be fixed by Msft in the near future.
2. The user accepted the Office365 invitation from a Microsoft Account that also has a managed counterpart. For example, [email protected] creates a Microsoft account for his MSDN subscription. 2 years later [email protected] is migrated to Office365 as a part of a somedomain.sharepoint.com initiative within his organization. Ulysses logs in using his old Microsoft account and accesses his subscription and a few days later he accepts a share request from an external partner. His OLD Microsoft account is incorrectly joined to the external partner’s directory and when he revisits the site Microsoft can’t properly associate his old account with the new one.
3. User accepted invitation as Organizational account and is now attempting to access the site using their Microsoft account.

Solution

As a site admin visit the site settings page

Click on Site permissions

Click on any group (in this case I clicked on Members

Note the URL – change the number after the = to a “0”

Change the value after the = to a zero and hit enter and a screen displaying all people will appear (note that deleting MembershipGroupID completely from the QueryString yields the same screen)

In this final screen simply delete the user that receives the login issues, resend the invite, and test.

Finally, in order to share make sure sharing is enabled in the SharePoint console

Office 365 Partner User Invalid Sharing Error, 8.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings