I recently have been working across multiple Microsoft Teams Tenants and one of the challenges I could not figure out was how can I chat to Guest users outside of the my default Microsoft Teams.

The advantages of having a Guest user within your Microsoft Team within the Chat window means that I am not only able to have a chat with the user, but I can also have calls, share my screen and all the advantages that come with using Microsoft Teams with other users within my Microsoft Team. And as a bonus with having a Guest user in a team you can share Power BI Reports if they have access to those same reports!

To be totally honest it took me a while to figure this out, so hopefully this will help others using Microsoft Teams who are looking for a similar solution.

Creating a Teams Channel

The first thing that needs to happen is that I had to create a Teams Channel

  • I did this by clicking on “Join or create a team”
  • I then clicked on Create a team
  • I selected to build a team from scratch
  • I set it to Private
  • I then gave it an appropriate name, as with this example I set it to “Guest / External Users”
  • And then I clicked Create
  • Which then went to work and created the Team
  • I then clicked on Skip where it asked to Add Members
    • The reason I did this was because I want to show where you can add additional members to your teams’ channel at a later time.

Adding Guest users to a Teams Channel

This is where I can now add Guest users to a team’s channel.

  • In Microsoft Teams, I click on my Team name and then click Manage Team
  • On the right-hand side, I then click on Add member
  • Where it says “Start typing a name or group” I put in the full email address of the Guest user that I want to add
    • As you can see above it gives me the option to add the email address as a guest, I clicked on the option
  • I then could see it, what I then did was to edit the Name to give it a more meaningful name
    • I then clicked on the tick
  • I then clicked Add
  • I could then see that the account was added as a guest

How the Guest User gets access to the Team

In the steps below is what happens with the Guest User gets the email invitation

  • Below is what the email looks like when they were added.
  • They then click on Open Microsoft Teams
  • It then is actually creating the Guest Account in Azure Active Directory where it shows the permissions
  • They then click on Accept, which then grants them access.
  • And depending on the settings they might have to select Open Microsoft Teams
  • It will then prompt them to Switch to your organization, which in my example is fourmoo.com
  • Now the Guest User has been added to the team in the fourmoo.com tenant

Chatting with the Guest User

Finally, I now get to the part where I can now chat with the Guest User which I show in the steps below.

  • I go into Microsoft Teams, right click on Chat and select New Chat
  • I am then prompted to “start typing a name or group”
    • I start typing the name of the person
  • I then click on the above and I can then see it in the To:
  • Now I can start chatting with the Guest user
  • Because this user is now a Guest in my FourMoo.com Teams tenant I now have all the available teams’ options where I can have a video call, call or share my screen with them.

Conclusion

What I have shown today is how to chat with a Guest user in your companies Microsoft Team without having to leave your default teams tenant.

Thanks for reading and I hope that you found this helpful.

As always, any comments are appreciated and welcome!

And here is to a great 2020