Guest access to projects
Often there are external users from customers or freelance involved which should have access to a project or roadmap as well without the need of having a project license. This is possible in other project management solutions!

Hi everyone!
I have read through the comments, and we have a new update that may benefit some on this thread.
We have just announced that we are supporting read-only access for Projects & Roadmaps with an O365 license within a tenant.
You can learn more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/project-for-the-web/office-365-user-view-access-to-project-and-roadmap
~J
47 comments
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Rovin commented
Any updates on this. Shocked that a Project management tool restricts collaboration. At least allow users to download the mpp files and share them offline. Excel is useless when it comes to exporting the project.
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Rob Gibbs commented
+1 - please allow "GUEST" access to anyone on the team or in the group without additional licensing...
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CME commented
a read-only access for external users would be extremely helpful - it is not practical that only users of the same tenent can do this. We have no projects without external companies and service providers.... These companies and service providers do not need to be able to work on the project but should be able to see where the joint project stands and whether the preliminary work for their work has already been completed and what its status is
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CME commented
essential! - which projects have no external project participants
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We're sorry that you had a negative experience. You are correct that we don't support guest users yet. I did want you to know that you can assign the tasks placeholder resources so you can track who is doing the work. This help article can walk you through it - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/project-for-the-web/create-nonuser-resources-in-project-for-the-web
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Anonymous commented
After spending 2 hours entering all the tasks, we just found out that we can't assign external users nor placeholders values. We're so ****** off at this obvious omission that we're moving to Atlassian. MS you just missed an opportunity of great collaboration but preferred trying to extract more money from licensing instead... Across your tools, there is a clear pattern of assuming people only work internally, but small size businesses don't... and you constantly make it difficult to work with other businesses or external folks unlike more nimble SaaS vendors.
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T commented
Working with a collaboration tool, without collaboration within a project team (2 companies), although both are having the license, is very disappointing.
Is there any progress?Thank you very much in advance for your feedback!
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Anonymous commented
Hi @Microsoft Project Team, can you give us an update regarding this topic? This is really poor unfortunately. We want to work together with an external company in project for web. Both have O365 license, both have Project license but we cant work together.
Are you working on a solution already? This would be really helpful!
Thank you!
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Anonymous commented
unbelieveable. I guess Microsoft doesn't believe in consultants or collaboration. There has to be a way to collaborate in Project between consulting firms and clients. Otherwise it will remain useless. If the clients consent and if the client and consultant both have licenses and tenants there is absolutely no excuse for Microsoft to not support this.
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Nathan Zarnstorff commented
Hey Microsoft,
I'm having the same problem - my team is geographically and organizationally distributed. My client prefers MS Project, but we can't seem to allow organizationally diverse users or even consultants/clients to collaborate in the MS software suite.
Both GoogleDrive and Asana allow collaboration outside of an established organization. Can you add this feature to Microsoft 365/Project Online?
Thanks!
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Anonymous commented
I find it impossible to understand how this feature has not been included. We are working on a new project across 4 different firms each with their own tenant and decided we wanted better functionality than Planner, which otherwise was well integrated for inter - company collaboration. As a bonus, Planner has the new consolidation with To Do. Project for the web can currently neither if I understand correctly - you can't assign Teams Guests (or External) as resources, and those who do get assigned still won't get their new tasks added to the (ahem) consolidated Planner task view.
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Adam Crain commented
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Adam Crain commented
Not being able to share with External Guest users as read-only is a failure of the product. Is it really so hard given we can do it with Planner?
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Jackson commented
This is important. We work for external users.
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Ed commented
External access would be very desirable, so I can share schedules with my customers without sending a project file or PDF
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Craig knox commented
People need to start being more blunt with feedback. View only for O365 licensed people it somewhat helpful, until you look at the fact that a lot of people are working with EXTERNAL clients.
Other options not only allow view only to that population, but if that external client has tasks they are responsible for that are being tracked, they can update their status WITHOUT a paid license on most platforms these days.I am not going to request a licenses and pay for it for someone who might need it for a few weeks while they are assigned to deliver a one time work product to never need to do anything again. Then I have to have that license revoked after paying for them to be able to update thier status. Instead, this creates time consuming follow up via email for a Project Manager and manual labor to constantly update and follow up on everything. It is very counter intuitive to the whole O365 collaboration experience.
Yet, I can use a competing product that is lower cost, more feature rich, connect it to Team's and Power BI and accomplish everything above and be more productive and store file attachments and have comments on line items in a plan, plus collaborate on documents with a team, but not in the Microsoft world????
A year later and Project for the web is still a quarter baked product. The desktop app is still everyone's go to, and the SharePoint dependency for getting projects in the cloud with that route is awful.
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Stephen Atherton commented
I'm trying to share a project with Microsoft to highlight and manage with my Customer Success and Strategic Account Managers.
They don't even have access. Please allow us to share with Guest users
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Anonymous commented
The Admin comment does does not address the need as already stated. The need is to have a customer or external user view the project. If the guest doesn't have the license you are screwed for you can not give a guest a license as far as I know. Even worse, based on the comment, the license has to be on the same tenant. The post would be irrelevant entirely.
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David C commented
Agree with the need, and although the admin indicating that Project is available to everyone with a license in the tenent for read-only viewing is good, it doesn't solve the need. A few different needs:
1) Need to be able to assign a task to an external person, or at least to a placeholder that is not an internal user, as we perform projects with many 3rd parties and need to be able to indicate tasks assigned to them. Even if 3rd parties can't see or interact with the plan, I need to be able to be able to track their tasks internally.
2) It would be great if they could be able to see the plan. My use case is I create a team for a project, and I list my project plan in a Project tab in the team. It would be great if guests to that team had read access to the plan in that tab just as the rest of the team did.
3) It would be even better if 3rd parties could update tasks assigned to them, but getting #1 or #1 and #2 above would satisfy the vast majority of my use cases.
2) I -
Phil Hershkowitz commented
I want to be able to add contacts and other non-user resources directly in Project for the Web without going through the rather convoluted process of adding them in powerapps as described here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/project-for-the-web/create-nonuser-resources-in-project-for-the-web