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
59 comments
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Emmanuel Chaudron commented
indeed, very frustrating. Is Microsoft doing something about this?
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Anonymous commented
Any progress on this... being a small company and working with many larger organizations, having read only guest access is a mandatory requirement for me.
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Anonymous commented
Guests are just people who happen tgo not have an account in the tenant, it can still be an employee!
Stop this stupid handling of guests. Being a guest means authentication happens somewhere else, it should have NOTHING to do with authorization!
Guest should always and everywhere be treated just like any other user.
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Alan Espinoza Olivares commented
This is an essential feature!
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Anonymous commented
This is essential. You are misreading the marketplace and competition. It is very very rare that a problem gets solved/project gets done only with internal users.
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James Falgout commented
This is critical and isn't a nice to have. It's a collaboration tool, and needs to be treated as such
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Kat commented
There is no point to this tool if I can't collaborate with external guests.
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Lázaro Hermoso commented
This needs to be done! External users should have read-only access with an invite by email
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Anonymous commented
We have been a O365 customer for 5+ years. I am currently using the 30 day trial to see if the Web version of Project will work for us in lieu of our aging Project 2010 licenses. Finding that I can't share with external users is a complete deal breaker. That's $10/user/mth that Microsoft will not be getting from us.
And I saw the Article posted in April 2020 with some detailed work around. It is too technical and I don't understand how to do that. Nor does it sound like a process I would want to follow for every external user we work with/for.
We should simply be able to type and email address and share like how One Drive operates. Microsoft totally missed the boat by STILL not having this feature.
Even Read Only access would be helpful!
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Doug commented
Evaluating moving company over from Google to Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Planner is too lightweight to manage projects and need basic things like dependency on other tasks - so if one task slips the dates can be update automatically on dependent tasks. Have use MS Project (desktop) in the past and want that power. HOWEVER HAVING TO PAY $10 A MONTH FOR A MEMBER OF THE TEAM JUST TO UPDATE STATUS virtually doubles the price of each person (from $12.50 to now $22.50 a month) and if I add someone on the team from an outside agency - I also have to pay $10 monthly for them to get a license?
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Andrew Norris commented
The inability to share with guests is holding us back from adopting Project for Web.
It's a shaping up to be a great tool but without being able to share with our clients (read-only) we can't use it.
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Christoph Duerr commented
A real disaster. Just worked on this schedule for a couple of hours, only to find out that outside people cannot access. While I can add them to the underlying outlook group, they are not able to see the schedule. This is truly awful, and a thing that should have been in the product from day 1!
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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!