How to Collaborate with External Users in Microsoft Teams

The flexibility to invite external users outside of your organization to chat allows for better collaboration. Customers, suppliers, and partners will be able to communicate with you more easily.?

Have you recently migrated from Slack to Teams and are completely new to Microsoft Teams? There are two ways to communicate and collaborate with external users of Microsoft Teams. Depending on your external collaboration needs, you can use one or both access ways.?

1. External Access?

If you need to search, call, chat, or schedule meetings with people outside your business who use Teams, Skype for Business (online or on-prem), or Skype, set up external access.?

External access is enabled by default for all domains. You can limit external access by allowing or disallowing specific domains or turning them off completely.???

External access is enabled by default for all domains in Microsoft Teams. Follow these steps to update the external access configuration from the default:?

1. Go to Org-wide settings > External access in the Microsoft Teams admin center.?
2. Toggle the Users can communicate with other Skype for Business and Teams users switch to On.?
3. Click Add domain to allow or block certain domains. Enter the domain's name and add it to the Allow or Block list.?
4. Click Save to save all your changes

2. Guest Access?

Allows individuals from outside the company to become practically full-fledged team members, with the ability to make calls, chat, schedule meetings, and access shared files. Team owners can add individual guests.??

You may use guest access when you want to give an external user access to the same Teams activities, channels, and shared resources as native team members.?

Members with Global Administrator or Teams Administrator access enable and manage guest access in Teams by following the steps below:?

1. Select Org-wide settings, then Guest access in the Microsoft Teams admin panel.?
2. Turn on the Allow guest access in Teams, then click Save.?

It will take 2–24 hours for the update to take effect across your Microsoft 365 tenant after guest access is enabled.?

Migrating Direct Messages without deleting them or losing them is the solution. CloudFuze can help you move all your Direct messages without leaving anything behind.

How to Add an External User as a Guest to Your Team in Microsoft Teams?

In Teams, only team owners can invite a guest. Follow these steps to add a guest to your team:?

1. In the Teams app, navigate to the left sidebar, click Teams, and select the team to which you wish to add a guest.?
2. Click More options (...) and then Add member.?
3. After entering the guest's email address, click Edit guest information to give them a username. Then tap the Add button. A welcome email invitation will be sent to your guest.?

Differences Between External and Guest Access in Microsoft Teams?

Let us look at the table below for a complete list of external user and guest user capabilities.

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