Introduction

This article describes

• A potential reason that a guest or external user is unable to log in to a SharePoint Site and
• Steps to take that might resolve the problem.

Explanation

When you invite someone that does not have an @vt.edu address to your SharePoint Site, they must accept the invite and authenticate from the same email account the invite was sent to or they will get an error.

One potential scenario that causes this:

1. User is currently logged in with Alpha@abc.com (such as a personal account created during a personal PC setup or an Xbox Live account).
2. User gets the invite in their Beta@abc.com account, clicks on it, tries to authenticate (or is already authenticated) with Alpha@abc.com.
3. User gets an authentication error because the system is receiving authentication credentials from Alpha@abc.com when it is expecting credentials from Beta@abc.com.

They may have to forcibly log out of that Alpha@abc.com and make sure they attempt to authenticate with the proper one (in this example, Beta@abc.com).

There are some ways that the user can ensure they are accepting the invite and authenticating from the same account the invite was sent to:

• Log out of all accounts before accepting the invite and/or authenticating from the same email account the invite was sent to
• Log in to the site using the appropriate account with a private browser window such as an InPrivate (Edge Browser) or Incognito (Chrome Browser) window

Further, the owner of the site will not be able to see any information that the users have logged in correctly or incorrectly, they will only see the correct email that the original invite was sent to in the members list. If the user still cannot authenticate, the owner of the site can try to remove the user and add them again. Steps to remove a user from a SharePoint Site can be found at the How to delete users from a SharePoint site KB.