Several operations teams need to send email to groups containing both employees and external customers, contractors, and other partners. The current approach is to create external users in Entra ID and add them as guests to Microsoft 365 groups, but this is becoming difficult to maintain. IT does not want to create and audit dozens or hundreds of groups and external accounts, especially when the operations teams should manage their own memberships. Personal Outlook contact lists are one possible workaround, but they are difficult to share and likely to receive pushback. Is there a cleaner way to provide shared, self-managed distribution lists for internal and external recipients without filling Entra ID and the global address list with unnecessary objects?
2 Answers
The practical option is to delegate ownership of the groups to the operations teams and give them a documented process for adding and removing guests. If they cannot create groups or external identities themselves, automate the request and membership workflow with something like Power Automate. Require an owner, a business justification, approval where appropriate, and periodic review or expiration so IT is not handling every change manually.
There probably is not a native Microsoft 365 option that provides shared, self-managed lists containing external recipients without creating some kind of directory or mail-enabled object. Personal Outlook contact lists are private and do not solve the shared-management problem. You will likely need to choose between delegated distribution groups with an automated lifecycle process, or a separate mailing-list/service platform that stores and manages external recipients outside Entra. Whichever route you take, define ownership, approval, auditing, and automatic cleanup up front.
That is the tradeoff we are running into: the business wants shared lists, while IT wants to avoid maintaining external identities and many one-off groups. A separate service or a tightly automated workflow may be the only way to keep both sides satisfied.
That still leaves us with a large number of Entra users and groups, which is exactly what we are trying to avoid. The main requirement is for several operations users to share and manage a common mailing list without IT creating every object.