Guess access for Microsoft Teams is finally here after a few months delay. I am very excited about this feature because it makes Microsoft Teams even more useful; extending collaboration with customers, vendors, contractors and more!
If you want to learn more about using Guest Access see my post Using Microsoft Teams Guest Access.
Right now guests invited to Microsoft Teams will need a Azure Active Directory account, but later it will be possible for anyone with a Microsoft Account (MSA) to be invited as a guest in to Microsoft Teams.
Guest Access is currently rolling out and may not yet be visible in your Office 365 tenant. Here’s a handy link to follow to keep updated. Once enabled you may also have wait some time before it starts working for your invited guests, you may see this message while you wait (TeamsDisabledForTenantForbidden):
You should also check that you have the latest updates installed:
Learn more at the official announcement blog here.
Here’s how you turn it on…
Enable Microsoft Teams Guest Access
Turning on Guess Access to Microsoft Teams is an administrative setting managed from the Office 365 Admin Portal.
Sign-in as an administrator to https://portal.office.com, then open “Admin”.
Browse to “Settings” -> “Services & add-ins” -> “Microsoft Teams“:
Under “Pick the licence you want to configure“, select “Guest“, then toggle “Microsoft ” to “On“:
Enable Office 365 Groups Guest Access
Document management in Microsoft Teams is managed by Office 365 Groups. You’ll probably want to enable your guests to access shared documents.
Browse to “Settings” -> “Services & add-ins” -> “Office 365 Groups“:
Use the toggle switch to choose the correct settings for your organisation. The default setting is “On”, and would be recommended in most cases to get the most out of Microsoft Teams Guest Access.
That’s all! Of course you may want to further define what how your Guests interact with your Teams. Learn more at the official Office Support site:
Inviting a Guest
Now that things are configured, you can start inviting guests to participate in you Teams.
This is no different to adding a team member from within your organisation, except that you would use the full email address of the guest you want to add:
When a guest is invited to join a team, they receive a welcome email message that includes some information about the team and what to expect now that they’re a member. The guest must redeem the invitation in the email message before they can access the team and its channels.
Features
The following table compares the Microsoft Teams functionality available for an organization’s team members to the functionality available for a guest user on the team.
| Capability in Teams | Teams user in the organization | Guest user |
| Create a channel
Team owners control this setting. |
 |
|
| Participate in a private chat | |
|
| Participate in a channel conversation | |
|
| Post, delete, and edit messages | |
|
| Share a channel file | |
|
| Share a chat file | |
|
| Add apps (tabs, bots, or connectors) | |
|
| Create tenant-wide and teams/channels guest access policies | |
|
| Invite a user via any email address outside the Office 365 tenant’s domain | |
|
| Create a team | |
|
| Discover and join a public team | |
|
| View organization chart | |
NOTE: Office 365 admins control the features available to guests.
Finally
I hope this helps you get started quickly with Microsoft Teams Guest Access. I will keep this post updated as I learn more about the features. Check back soon!
We’re struggling to get it to work.
Have added a few guests, some of which subsequently appear in the team list as ‘Unknown User’, some with actual names.
No guest has yet been able to access any team content.
Still investigating, but clearly not straight forward.
I had the exact same experience. For me it was a waiting game after I enabled guest access for the tenant. It seems to take a few hours to fully activate, so you should wait a bit before trying to add users. After a few hours I re-added those accounts that showed up as unknown or disappeared completely and it worked. Hopefully its as easy as that for you 🙂
Also another issue I have found is that if you are using ADFS authentication, then you can login to the Team as a guest, but you see nothing under the Teams tab.