This article aims to provide you with information about external (invited) users, and when and how the feature should be used.
What are external users?
External users are invited individually or as a Google Group / Microsoft Group to be a part of a specific Channel.
When should you invite external users?
Invitations should be used to invite people that have a Google or Microsoft account but are not part of your Google or Microsoft Organization. This means that the users should not have the same email domain as your company.
Use cases
Example use cases are external consultants, third-party companies, subsidiaries, etc. External users are a great way to give specific access to content within your Happeo to people outside of your organization.
How does inviting users work?
To add an external (invited) user you will need to be a Happeo Admin and go to:
- Admin Settings
- User management
- Invites
From this section, you will be able to invite users manually, or through a CSV file (batch invite).
You can also monitor invitations that have been sent but not accepted and resend them.
When these users are invited, they will receive an email to accept the invitation.
Manually invite users
To manually invite a user, you can:
- Type their email address
- Select their user role (user or admin)
- Click Invite user
Batch invite users
Creating a CSV file
If you want to invite multiple External Users in one go, you can do so via a CSV file.
For instance, you can create a CSV with the users you would like to invite using, for example, Google Spreadsheet and then export it as a CSV file.
In the file, you must have:
- One row per email address
- The user role on the right side of the email row
The user roles consist of:
- Normal
- Admin
As an example, you can find the format in which the CSV file should be below.
You can also find an example CSV by going to:
- Admin Settings
- User Management
- Invites
- Invite by CSV
- Download example CSV
Uploading the CSV file
To upload the CSV file, you can:
- Navigate to the Admin Settings by clicking your avatar
- Click User Management
- Click Invites
- Click Invite by csv
- Upload the CSV file
If you have Seatcap enabled
When uploading the CSV file, the number of available Seats will be displayed.
After uploading the CSV file
You will be presented with an overview of the users you wish to invite as well as the user roles you provided in the CSV file.
In the overview, you can adjust the user roles by clicking on them and selecting the appropriate roles.
Once everything looks good, you can click Send invites.
Viewing and downloading the results
Viewing the results
If you want to view the results, you can click Show results. These results show you if the invitation(s) was sent and if the invitation(s) was already created.
Downloading the results
To see a full overview of the batch invite results, you can click Download results. These results will be downloaded as a CSV file.
The CSV file contains:
- The emails you provided
- The user roles you assigned
- The date on which the invitation was sent / created
- The results of the invitations
- Success
- Error
- Message
- Invitation sent
- Invitation has already been created
(Pending) invited users
When an invited user's seat is pending, they will appear in the Reserved seats in the Seats Overview.
These seats are reserved so the invited user will immediately be granted a seat upon accepting the invite, rather than having to wait for a seat to become available. Should you wish to remove a reserved seat, simply cancel the pending invite.
For more information about User Management and Seating, you can read this article.
Ways in which users can be invited to the platform
- Entire platform: The invite is sent from the Admin section where the account is then treated as any other internal account
- Channel: External Users are invited individually or as a Google / Microsoft Group to be a part of a specific Channel. This means they will receive access to the Channel but also to the added Google Drive / Microsoft OneDrive folder
- Page group: External Users can be added to a specific Page Group via a Google / Microsoft Group
Error messages
CSV batch invite
No seats available
To invite an external user, you need to have enough seats available for the number of users you invite. For more information, please see our User Management and Seat Cap articles.
Invite failed to be sent
If an invite fails to be sent, you can try the process again by uploading the same CSV file you created initially. Happeo will then pick up the users that failed to be sent invites.
Invitation already created
If an invitation has already been created, the owner of the email to which the invitation was previously sent must accept the invitation.
I can't find the invitation email
Invitation emails are titled by the name of the user who invited you followed by “has invited you to join Happeo.”
Sometimes Happeo invitation emails might end up in spam. This could happen because of multiple reasons. To make sure that emails never end up in spam, you can add our sending address to your organization's email service's whitelist.
To do so, please add the following senders to the whitelist:
- emails.getuniverse.com
- emails.happeo.com
Microsoft limitations
Externally invited Microsoft users will not be able to access shared folders or documents, despite being given access on the Microsoft side. Users can only access folders and documents located within their own Microsoft tenant. In other words, Microsoft users cannot access documents shared from a different Microsoft tenant as the core document does not live in the shared tenant. This is, unfortunately, a Microsoft limitation.
This limitation also exists in Happeo’s Search, meaning that users cannot search for shared folders and documents from different Microsoft tenants.