Guest Access for Microsoft Teams now available, but there is a catch

This week, Microsoft announced that the long awaited Guest Access function is now available for all Office 365 business and education customers. As of now, Office 365 users can add people from outside their company to a team, so guests can participate in chats, join meetings, collaborate on documents, and more.

However, There is an important requirement for the guest access to work:

The invited guest needs to have an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account.

This means that anyone across Microsoft commercial cloud services and third-party Azure AD integrated apps can be added as a guest in Teams. In Other words, if you have an existing Azure AD account, or Office 365 work or school account, you can be invited as a guest.

How does guest access looks like

When a guest is invited to join a team, they receive a welcome email message that includes information about the team. The guest must accept the invitation in the email message before they can access the team.

All team members see a message announcing that the team owner has added a guest and providing the guest’s name. Everyone on the team can identify easily who is a guest, as a banner indicates “This team has guests” and a “GUEST” label appears next to each guest’s name.

For more information about guest access, please visit this link.

Teams is available to customers with Office 365 Enterprise E1–E5, Business Essentials, Business Premium and Education subscription plans. For more information, please contact us at [email protected].