Invite buyers to a data room
Create an external group, add the buyers, choose which folders they can see, and send the invitations by publishing the data room.
Give a buyer organisation access to your data room: create an external group in Teams, add its people, grant the group access to the folders it may see, switch its access on, and publish. Each buyer receives an invitation email with a personal link to the Deal Portal.
Before you start
- The project has a Deal Portal. Without one, external groups show a No portal chip and buyers cannot be added; see Set up and brand the Deal Portal.
- You are an owner of the project. Only owners create, rename or delete external groups.
- You have the buyers' email addresses. One group per buyer organisation keeps access easy to review and to withdraw later, and keeps bidders invisible to each other: members of a group see only their own group's names, never those of another group.
- If the Deal Portal requires an NDA, its text or PDF is in place under Project Settings › Deal Portal, or the NDA requirement is turned off. Publishing is blocked until one of the two is true.
Steps
- Open the project and go to Teams. Select New Team, choose External Group, enter the buyer's organisation name, for example Halden Partners, and select Create Team. External users sign in through the Deal Portal only and never see your internal workspace.
External Group is the team type for buyers and their advisers.1.External Group2.Team Name3.Create Team - In the group's Members tab, select Add external user. Type or paste the buyers' email addresses; commas or new lines both work, and "Anna Berg anna@fund.com" fills in the name too. Select Add users. Before the data room is published, no email is sent yet: the people show as Queued for publish.
The same dialog on a live group: the button reads Invite external user, and Send invitations emails the people immediately.1.Email addresses2.Send invitations - Open the Data room access tab. Set Viewer on the Dataroom row at the top to share everything, or on individual folders to share part of it. Folders left at No role are absent from the buyers' data room rather than shown as locked. The four permission boxes on the right, Can download, No watermark, No password and View unredacted, extend a role and stay off unless you turn them on.
Halden Partners sees everything except folder 6, Human Resources & Talent.1.Data room access tab2.Role: Viewer3.Role: No role - Switch the group's External access toggle on and confirm with Activate access. The dialog lists who will be emailed and when: nothing is sent until the portal is published.
Activating a group before publishing queues the invitations. - Go to Project Settings › Deal Portal. When the chip reads Ready to publish, select Publish data room, check the list of recipients, and select Publish and send invites. Publishing moves the data room to Published, turns on external access and sends the invitation emails. See The data room lifecycle for what changes at that point.
The dialog names every external user who will be emailed.
The order matters. Access is granted to the group, not to people, so a folder granted after the buyers are in is visible to them at once, and a person added after the room is published is emailed at once. Before publication nothing reaches anyone, whatever the order. Two switches decide when the invitation email leaves: the data room's publication and the group's External access toggle.
Read this as text
When is a buyer's invitation email sent? A buyer added to an external group is emailed only once two things are true: the data room is published and the group's External access toggle is on. If the data room is not published, the person is Queued for publish and emailed the moment you select Publish and send invites. If it is published but the group's External access is off, the person is queued and emailed when you switch the toggle on and confirm Activate access. When both are already true, the email goes out immediately and the Account column reads Invited. While the portal is archived nothing is sent until it is republished. A buyer who already has an account from another deal receives a link without a temporary password. Resend invite on a member's row works once the room is published and the group's External access is on. The portal link stays the same; a buyer who has not signed in yet gets a new temporary password and the old one stops working, and a buyer with an account gets a reminder.
Check the result
The group shows Active in the Teams list and its External access reads Active. In the Members tab, each buyer's Account column moves from Invited to Active once they have signed in, and the NDA column shows whether they have accepted it.
Once the portal is live, the button reads Invite external user and new people are emailed immediately.
To add buyers to a live group later, use Invite external user in the Members tab. They are emailed immediately.
The group's Settings tab also holds what the group may do in the portal beyond reading: AI chat with its monthly credit limit, and Q&A with its availability and monthly question limit. See Answer buyer questions.
If something goes wrong
Ask them to check their spam folder. Then open the group's Members tab, select the ⋮ menu on the buyer's row and choose Resend invite.
In the Members tab, select the ⋮ menu on their row and choose Remove. They lose access to the portal as soon as you confirm.
The project has no Deal Portal yet, so there is nothing for buyers to sign in to. Set it up under Project Settings › Deal Portal first; the group's No portal chip links there.
Open the group's Data room access tab. A folder without a role is absent from their portal. Grant the folder the Viewer role; the change reaches them within a minute. Check what someone can see shows how to read the tab.
Invitation problems covers queued invitations, resending and expired links.
Select the steps to publish chip next to it. It lists what is missing. Missing NDA content and unsaved portal settings block publishing; a missing active external group or missing folder access for it are warnings, since the room can be published before buyers are set up. Each line links to the place to fix it.