Trying to“Follow" a site in SharePoint silently fails when user lacks OneDrive license on tenant #10657
Description
Target SharePoint environment
SharePoint Online
What SharePoint development model, framework, SDK or API is this about?
SharePoint REST API
Developer environment
None
What browser(s) / client(s) have you tested
- 💥 Internet Explorer
- 💥 Microsoft Edge
- 💥 Google Chrome
- 💥 FireFox
- 💥 Safari
- mobile (iOS/iPadOS)
- mobile (Android)
- not applicable
- other (enter in the "Additional environment details" area below)
Additional environment details
We are a multi-tenant organisation, the bug is present when the user is connecting (via cross-tenant synchronization) to SharePoint Online on a different tenant (but still within our organisation).
Describe the bug / error
We are a multi-tenant organisation. Users have full licenses on their national tenants, but when they visit our "global" SharePoint (authenticated via cross-tenant synchronization), most users have no specific licensing on that tenant.
If they click on the "Follow" button at the top right of a SharePoint site home page, the UI updates to suggest the action was successful, but if you refresh the page - the status of the button resets back to "Not following", and nothing has been set.
The "Follow" button is linked to this API end point:
https://domain.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename/_api/v2.1/favorites/followedSites/oneDrive.add
... which fails with a response including:
"error": {
"@odata.type": "#oneDrive.error",
"code": "generalException",
"message": "General exception while processing"
}
Steps to reproduce
- Access a SharePoint site with an account that has no specific licensing
- Click the "Not following" button in the page header, and observe that it changes to "Following"
- Refresh the page, and note that the button has reset back to "Not following"
- In the network trace, look for calls to "_api/v2.1/favorites/followedSites/oneDrive.add", and note that an error is returned.
Expected behavior
The expected behavior is that all users should be able to "follow" a SharePoint site, regardless of licensing. This is especially an issue in multi-tenant organisations, where a fully licensed user (on their home tenant) may access SharePoint sites on a different tenant (but still within the same organisation) via cross-tenant synchronization. I note that "Save for later" (found in the footer of sub-pages) does work without any specific licensing.