Microsoft Teams Expands Collaboration with Guest Access

Microsoft Teams was released about six months ago, and since then more than 125,000 organizations have discovered the benefits to teamwork, that comes to life with Teams.

Recently Microsoft has made Teams even better with the rollout of guest access, a new addition to Teams that allows you to add people from outside your company to a team, so your guests can participate in chats, join meetings, collaborate on documents, and more. Microsoft Teams guest access is available for all Office 365 commercial and education customers.

Teams designed guest access with three principals at the forefront:

Teamwork: Anyone with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account can be added as a guest in Teams. That means anyone across the 870 million user accounts-across Microsoft commercial cloud services and third-party Azure AD integrated apps- can be added as a guest in Teams.

Microsoft stated they’ll later add the ability for anyone with a Microsoft Account (MSA) to be added as a guest in Teams. If the guest doesn’t have an existing MSA, they will be directed to create a free account using their current corporate or consumer email address, like Outlook.com or Ymail.com for example.

Security and compliance: In Microsoft Teams, guest accounts are added and securely managed within Azure AD through Azure AD B2B Collaboration. This enables enterprise-grade security, like conditional access policies for guest user access. Azure AD also uses adaptive machine learning algorithms and heuristics to detect anomalies and suspicious incidents, enabling mitigation or remediation actions, such as multi-factor authentication, to be triggered as appropriate. In addition, with Azure AD, IT departments have unparalleled insight into the activities of external users in their organization through detailed sign-in and access reports. Guest user content and activities are under the same compliance and auditing protection as the rest of Office 365.

IT manageability: Guest access in Teams comes with the ability for IT to centrally manage how guests participate within their Office 365 environment, providing consistency across application experiences in Office 365. IT admins can quickly and easily view, add, or revoke a guest’s access to the host tenant.

How a guest joins a team in Teams:

Office 365 admin must first enable guest access in Microsoft Teams before a guest can join a team. Office 365 admin must be signed in and go to Settings > Services & add-ins > Microsoft Teams. Select Guest in Select the user/license type you want to configure, and select On in Turn Microsoft Teams on or off for all users of this type. It could take up to an hour for the settings to take effect. For more details, see “Turn on or off guest access for Microsoft Teams” on this article’s Manage tab.

Here’s how a guest becomes a member of a team:

• Step 1-A team owner or Office 365 admin adds a guest to a team.
• Step 2-The Office 365 admin or the team owner can manage a quest’s capabilities as necessary. For example, allowing a quest to add or delete channels or disabling access to files.
• Step 3-The quest receives a welcome email from the team owner, inviting them to join the team. After accepting the invitation, the guest can participate in teams and channels, receive and respond to channel messages, access files in channels, and participate in chat.

If you’re interested in learning about what the guest experience is like, check out this webpage.