How to turn on Microsoft Teams guest access
Microsoft Teams allows organizations to add all its employees to a single, collective group called Teams. Employees can then be separated by department or function into channels.
All team members can easily be added (or removed) from a channel whenever the need arises. Within an organization’s team, movement is flexible for its members.
Microsoft Teams guest access
A Microsoft Teams team will include everyone in the organization. A team member’s identity is normally determined by their email which is created on the same domain that Microsoft Teams is configured for. To that end, anyone with an email that is not on the same domain is excluded from the team.
It does stand to reason that on occasion, a team may need to invite an outsider i.e., someone who isn’t on the same domain, to a team. Microsoft Teams has the flexibility to do so in the form of Guest Access.
Guest Access allows a team owner to invite an outsider to the team. This feature is turned off by default and must be enabled before it can be used.
Enable Microsoft Teams guest access
To enable Microsoft Teams guest access, follow these steps.
- Access the Microsoft Teams admin center.
- In the column on the left, expand Organization settings.
- Select Guest access.
- In the pane on the right, open the Allow guest access in Teams dropdown.
- Select the On option.
- Wait for additional settings to populate.
- Go throught the Calling, Meeting, and Messaging sections and enable features for guests.
- Click Save.
Note: the new settings can take a few hours to activate.
Invite guests in Microsoft Teams
To invite a guest to a Microsoft Teams team, follow these steps.
- Open Microsoft Teams and sign in with an admin account.
- Select the team and click the more options button next to it.
- Select Add member.
- Enter the email for the guest.
- Select the add guest option.
- An invite will be sent to the user to join the team.
Conclusion
Guess access is only available for the paid Microsoft Teams version. As such, this version is also configured to work with Sharepoint and an Active Azure directory. This will not matter if all you’re doing is making calls and sending messages however, if you plan on sharing files with a guest user, you will have to go through the access setting for Sharepoint and Azure to make sure the files that have been shared can be accessed by the guest user.
