How do I add external users to my SharePoint online site? How to invite external users to my SharePoint online site to view my documents?
It’s possible to invite external users to SharePoint online by enabling allow options in Site Collections area and activating External Users Invitations features
1. Go to SharePoint Online | Administration Center | Site Collections |
Click on Settings | Manage External Users
2. Choose whether people outside your organization can be invited to access SharePoint Online as external users. External users can be granted access to any SharePoint Online resource.
Allow people outside your organization to be invited to access SharePoint Online.
3. The next most important step is to active your external users invitations features in Site settings | Site Collection Administration | Site Collection Features
4. Now Click on Site Actions | Share Site
5. Share your SharePoint Site window will pop up.
Browse for users to add to your site or type their e-mail address into the field provided. Separate multiple users with semi-colons.
Other then Hotmail or Live accounts may not work.
Now click on Share. This will send Share Your SharePoint Site notification to the user
SharePoint has sent invitation e-mail to the users.
The following user or users have been invited to the site. They will be added when they accept the invitation:
6. Login to your Hotmail account and you will see the invitation from SharePoint Online site. Click on Accept your invitations
The message you may get
Welcome to SharePoint Online
To accept your invitation, sign in with your Hotmail account OR Microsoft Online Services ID
Since I have Windows Live Hotmail account, I go head and click on Hotmail account and it logs me in using my Hotmail account
This is how you can invite or add external users to your SharePoint online site.
Aryan Nava 
I have seen some other articles about adding external users to sharepoint online sites but most of them are missing some steps. Your article provide all the steps i needed to invite external users to sharepoint online site. Thank You
Very helpful information. Thank You
Hi,
I have done all step. but when i login in by Windows Live Hotmail account it does not work. Can you tell me its really work? if you login hotmail account.
Thanks
Saiful
It worked for me. You may be missing some steps
We’re now considering to use Sharepoint 2013 Standard version, but we met several problems during the testing of Trial version, so here we have some queries. Please review them and advise prompt answers:
Is it possible to use Invite External User in SharePoint 2013? If so, please advise how to use it. The reason why I’m asking you this is because Invite External Users can be used in Office365.
The main issue I found is that you cannot invite users to your Private Site Collection. Good walkthrough though.