Step by Step process to activate guest access in Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams has started allowing guest access in organization to

collaborate or communicate with people outside your organization

boundaries by granting guest access to teams and channels. A guest is

someone who isn't an employee, student, or member of your

organization. E.g. guests may include partners, vendors, suppliers, or

consultants.

External access with

Microsoft Teams

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Step by Step process to activate guest access in Microsoft Teams.

INDEX

No Topics Page no. 1 Introduction 2

2 How to activate guest access in Microsoft Teams? 2

3 How to add guest access to Microsoft Teams? 6 4 How to Manage permission for guest member? 9

5 How to invite Guest users? 11 6 How to find if Team has Guest account in it? 11

7 How to view the guest accounts in Office 365? 12

8 How to Manage Guest in Team? 13 9 Lesson learned 18

Author: Balu Ilag Microsoft MVP (Office Servers and Services) © 9.17.2017, Balu Ilag, UC Engineer, Microsoft MVP Office Servers and

Services. Version 1.0

Contact me at: balasaheb.ilag@hotmail.com

Blog: http://communicationsknowledge.blogspot.com/ . This document covers step by step process to activate guest access with Microsoft teams. Target audience for this admin guide are Office 365 administrator, Microsoft Teams Admins and Skype for Business / Lync Administrator.

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Introduction:

Recently Microsoft allows Guest access to Teams, which was popular demand

from user community.

Microsoft Teams has started allowing guest access in organization to collaborate

or communicate with people outside your organization boundaries by granting

guest access to teams and channels. A guest is someone who isn't an employee,

student, or member of your organization. E.g. guests may include partners,

vendors, suppliers, or consultants.

How to activate guest access in Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams guest access is a tenant-level setting and it is turned OFF by

default. Office 365 Administrator can control guest access using Office 365 admin

center.

Guest access is included with all Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365

Enterprise, and Office 365 Education subscriptions. No additional Office 365

license is necessary.

Follow the below step to enable Microsoft Teams Guest access on your Tenant:

1. Login to https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home (You must have

Global Admin role permission in order to activate guest access).

2. Once Admin portal open, click on Settings > then select ‘Services & add-ins’.

refer below Image.

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3. Once Services and Add-ins page opens, Select ‘Microsoft Teams’. Refer

below Image.

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4. In ‘Select the user/license type you want to configure’, dropdown select

Guest. Refer below image.

5. Click or tap the toggle next to Turn Microsoft Teams ON or OFF for all users

of this type to On to turn on Teams and guest access for your organization.

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6. Now Settings by user/license type will show ‘Guest’ access as activated. As

showed in above image.

7. Finally Click on Save to enable Guest access.

8. Click on close to complete Guest access activation.

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How to add guest access to Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams can provide guest (external access) to teams, documents in

channels, resources, chats, and applications to their partners, while maintaining

complete control over their own corporate data.

Only people who are outside of your organization, such as partners or

consultants, can be added as guests. People from within your organization can

join as regular team members.

Team owners will be able to invite new guests and add existing directory guest

users to their respective teams. As a reminder, Microsoft Teams always honor

Azure Active Directory external settings to allow or prevent guest user addition to

the tenant.

Microsoft Teams guest access makes use of Azure Active Directory business-to-

business (B2B) collaboration capabilities as the underlying infrastructure to store

security principles information such as identity properties, memberships, and

multi-factor authentication settings.

Follow the below steps to add user for Guest Access:

1. Logon to Microsoft Teams and select ‘Teams’ and then click on respective

Teams.

2. click on More options and then click on ‘Add Members’ and Refer Below

Image.

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You can add the external member email address (Office 365 tenant email

address).

Note: Only Office 365 work or school account can be added as guest access.

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Type the email address of person which you want to add and then Select name, as

showed in the above image.

Select all required address to add as guest to your teams. Refer above Image.

To view the list of guest user added to your team;

In Team, click on More options and then select ad ‘View team’ to see added

member including guest member. Refer below image.

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How to manage permission for guest member?

1. Logon on to Microsoft Teams then click on to ‘Teams’ then click on More

options and then View team.

2. Then click on settings to see Guest permissions to see available options.

There are two options:

• Allow creating and updating channels

• Allow guests to delete channels

Refer the below Image.

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In addition to using the Office 365 admin center and the Azure Active Directory

portal, you can use Windows PowerShell to control guest access. Using

PowerShell, you do below:

• Allow or block guest access to all teams and Office 365 groups

• Allow guests to be added to all teams and Office 365 groups

• Allow or block guest users from a specific team or Office 365 group

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How to invite Guest users?

You must be a ‘Team’ owner or an Office 365 admin, to invite a guest to a team

on an individual basis. Refer below image.

How to find if Team has Guest account in it?

This is very simple, view team to see if Team has guest or not. Once you open

Team below team name you can see message “This team has guest”. Refer the

image for better clarity.

Also, you can tell if someone is a guest by looking anywhere their name appears—

the word “Guest” appears after it. You can also see everyone’s roles in the

Members tab of a team.

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How to view the guest accounts in Office 365?

All guest accounts will store under Guest Users tab on Office 365 Admin Center,

you will have ability to see the list of the all guest users.

Follow the below steps to view guest users:

1. Logon on to Office 365 portal with global admin account. URL:

https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home.

2. Once Office 365 Admin Center opens, expand the Users and the click on

Guest users. Refer the below image:

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Manage Guest in Team:

There are many things you manage for Guest,

1. Account switch: As a Guest, you can actually switch between a guest

account and other Teams accounts, click your profile picture, click Switch

accounts, and then pick the account you want.

2. When you add a guest, only their name gets added to their contact card. To

add or change other info (such as phone number or title), contact your IT

admin.

3. So far, you can't edit guest information from the Office 365 admin center or

the Exchange admin center. To edit guest accounts (such as display name or

profile photo), go to your Azure Active Directory portal.

4. Guests can leave the team at any time using Microsoft Teams web and

desktop clients. Refer the below image for leave the team using client.

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5. There are many things as guest you can do; below is the list of things you

can do as guest:

Guests can participate in channels, conversations, chats, and meetings;

they can share files in channels, add new channels, and use Wiki.

Capability Team member can do Guest can do

Participate in a private chat

Yes Yes

Create a channel

Yes Yes

Participate in a channel conversation

Yes Yes

Share a channel file

Yes Yes

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Share a chat file

Yes No

Add apps (such as tabs, bots, or connectors)

Yes No

Can be invited via any work or school account for Office 365

No Yes

Create a team

Yes No

Delete or edit posted messages

Yes Yes

Discover and join public teams

Yes No

Post in the General channel

Yes Yes

View org chart Yes No

There is access dependency on different Office 365 Services:

You can turn ON or OFF the sharing capability for Office 365. Also, the Sharing

option allows guests to be added to your organization. By default, the Sharing

option is enabled.

Control the allowing guest access to Office 365 groups:

You can actually control the allowing guest users to Microsoft Teams and Office

365 groups.

• Logon to Office 365 with global admin account permission. Using URL:

https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home.

• Click on to Settings and then select Services & add-ins.

• Select Office 365 Groups. Refer the below Image.

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• On the Office 365 Groups page, set the toggle to ON or OFF, depending if

you want to let team and group owners outside your organization access

Office 365 groups.

• Once you click or tap the toggle to ON next to Let group members outside

the organization access group content.

o Then you will see another option opens, ‘Let group owners add

people outside the organization to groups’ you can set the toggle ON

or OFF depending on your requirement.

Refer the below image.

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Lesson learned:

If you don’t allow Guest access on tenant level then you cannot add Guest

account to your Team. See the below error.

You cannot add other than Office 365 Account. I have tried to add my Gmail and

Hotmail account but not allowing to add. See the error message.

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Thank you.