External access for Microsoft Teams was a highly-desired feature released in September 2017. This tool, now available to all Office 365 Education and Commercial customers, allows the collaboration platform to compete with similar tools like HipChat and Slack, by ensuring that users can connect with clients, customers, and contractors outside of the Teams network.
With guest access, Office 365 users can connect with people outside of their company in a team, ensuring that third-party users have access to document collaboration, chats, and meetings. Since collaboration often goes beyond the internal business to include shareholders, suppliers, and other external figures, this feature can be crucial to running a successful business. The problem is that external users can come with additional security concerns.
How to Offer Guest Access to Microsoft Teams
Before CIOs can deliver guest access to users outside of Microsoft Teams, they'll need to turn on the "Guest" license or user type with their Azure AD administrator. Microsoft explains the process of enabling the guest feature in a video:
Once you have enabled guest access, adding people outside of your organisation to your meetings and chats is simple:
- Start by opening Microsoft Teams
- Right-click on the team you want to add a guest to
- Click on the "add members" option on the context menu, which opens another screen;
- Enter the email address of the individual you want to bring on board
Teams should recognise the address as being outside of your typical network and add the person as a guest.
