Share a SharePoint Gantt Chart With External Guests and Clients
Rolling this out to more teams?
Let our team set up project tracking in SharePoint
We design your project sites, lists, and Power Automate workflows, then train your team so project tracking actually sticks.
Plenty of projects involve people outside the company: a client signing off milestones, an agency delivering creative, a contractor running one workstream. Emailing a spreadsheet back and forth is how plans drift. Smart Gantt Chart lets those people work in the same plan as your team, inside your own SharePoint site.
What guests can do
A Microsoft 365 guest (an external collaborator invited through Entra ID B2B) who has Site Member (Contribute) permission on the site can:
- View projects in every view — Portfolio, Gantt, List, Kanban and Dashboard
- Add, edit and delete tasks
- Export to Excel, PowerPoint and PNG
- Import tasks from an Excel or CSV file
- Be named in Assigned To on any task — it is a plain text field, so no directory lookup is required
The two things guests cannot do
- Create a new project. Each project is its own SharePoint list, and creating a list needs Manage Lists permission, which guests do not have. An internal Site Owner or Member creates the project; the guest then manages tasks within it.
- Import from Microsoft Planner. Reading organizational Planner plans needs a same-tenant license, which guests typically do not have. Export the plan from Planner to Excel (Planner → Export plan → Excel), then use the Excel import path.
How to invite a guest
- On the SharePoint site, open Settings → Site permissions → Invite people.
- Enter the guest's email address and set their permission to Edit (Contribute / Site Member).
- The guest receives an email invitation and signs in with a Microsoft account.
- Once in, they can use the web part straight away for any project that already exists.
Tip: create every project the guest will work in before they arrive, so they can start adding tasks without waiting for an owner to be available.
Keep the access review honest
Guest access is only as tidy as the site it lives on. When the project ends, remove the guest from the site. To check which external users still have access afterwards, run a Smart Permissions report and filter it to external users — it is read-only, so it shows who has access without changing anything.
Where the data lives
Guests are working in lists on your site; nothing is copied to an outside service. See where Smart Gantt Chart stores project data for the detail, and Smart Gantt Chart to install it.
Frequently asked questions
Can a guest user edit tasks in Smart Gantt Chart?
Yes. A guest with Edit (Site Member / Contribute) permission on the site can add, edit and delete tasks in any existing project and use every view.
Why can't a guest create a new project?
Creating a project creates a SharePoint list, which needs Manage Lists permission. Guests do not have it, so an internal Site Owner or Member creates the project and the guest then works inside it.
Can guests import from Microsoft Planner?
Usually not. Reading organizational Planner plans needs a same-tenant license, which guests typically lack. Export the plan from Planner to Excel and use the Excel import instead.
Can I assign a task to a guest?
Yes. Assigned To is a plain text field, so any name can be entered — no directory lookup is needed.
The SharePoint project management guides
Build the plan, run it week to week, then share it with the people who only ever see the summary.
Build the plan
Start a project, add tasks with dates, and get a timeline on a SharePoint page.
Bring a task list, Excel sheet or Microsoft Planner board in through the import wizard.
Group work into phases and mark the dates that people actually care about.
The SharePoint lists the web part creates, who needs which permission, and what that means for governance.
Export a proven plan to Excel, reset the dates, and start every similar project from it.
Two ways to give a long task list structure, and the roll-up behavior to plan around.
Run the project
A 20-minute routine straight from the SharePoint page, ending with a one-click deck.
On Track, At Risk, Overdue or Done, derived from dates and progress instead of typed in.
Assign tasks, filter by assignee, and find the person carrying too much of the plan.
Cut a 400-task timeline down to the slice you need for a single conversation.
Retire completed work without losing the record, and recover a project deleted by mistake.
The Portfolio view: a status card per project with automatic health and a mini timeline.
Save the agreed dates, then see each task's finish variance in working days.
How simultaneous edits are protected, and the quick edits that save instantly.
Share and compare
Turn the live plan into a steering-committee deck, plus Excel and PNG output.
Where Calendar and Board views stop, and when dependencies and baselines make a Gantt worth it.
Smart Gantt Chart against Microsoft Project, Planner, Smartsheet, Monday and the rest.
The full picture of running projects from SharePoint, in one page.
The free, open-source Gantt web part that runs inside your own tenant.
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Rolling this out to more teams?
Let our team set up project tracking in SharePoint
We design your project sites, lists, and Power Automate workflows, then train your team so project tracking actually sticks.
About the author
Sean Regan
SharePoint & Microsoft 365 consultant with 20+ years of hands-on experience building SPFx web parts, migration tooling and tenant-grade automation. Maintainer of the open-source SharePoint Smart Solutions suite.