Guest access allows teams in your organization to collaborate with people outside your organization by granting them access to existing teams and channels in Teams. Anyone with a business or consumer email account, such as Outlook, Gmail, or others, can participate as a guest in Teams with full access to team chats, meetings, and files.
Who is a Guest?
A guest is someone who isn't an employee, student, or member of your organization. They don't have a school or work account with your organization. For example, guests may include partners, vendors, suppliers, or consultants. Anyone who is not part of your organization can be added as guest in Teams. This means that anyone with a business account (that is, an Azure Active Directory account) or consumer email account (with Outlook.com, Gmail.com or others) can participate as a guest in Teams, with full access to teams and channel experiences.
Limitations for Guests
In general, there are limitations for the guest experience and some of these are by design and some may be based on NYSED business rules. One example of a limitation driven by NYSED at the time of this publication is to disable file sharing for guests. Here is a list of some of the functionality that isn’t available to a guest in Teams that is based on Microsoft’s limitations:
- OneDrive for Business
- People search outside of Teams
- Calendar, Scheduled Meeting, or Meeting Details
- Create or revise a team
- Upload files to a person-to-person chat
How a Guest Joins a Team
A team owner in Microsoft Teams can add and manage guests in their teams via the web or desktop. Anyone with a business or consumer email account, such as Outlook, Gmail, or others, can participate as a guest in Teams, with full access to team chats, meetings, and files (that have been shared). 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.
Adding a Guest to Your Team
As the team owner, you will add a guest to the team. Remember, you can make other staff members who are on your team owners as well who can then share in the administration of your Team’s site. Go to your Team’s site and select the three dots to the right of the team name.
Select Add member from the menu. In the Add members dialog box type the email address of your guest. When you finish typing the complete email address, the Teams will prompt you to add as a guest. Click to add your guest.
Tip: Add your guest's name now. Select Edit guest information and type a friendly name for them. Be sure to take the time to do this now—you will not be able to do this later without the help of an ITS administrator. NOTE: file sharing to people outside the agency is disabled.
When you go to the menu item Manage team (after clicking the three dots to the right of the team name) expand the list for Members and guests and you will see that your participant has been added and has been designated accordingly: johnsmith@gmail.com (Guest). Your only option for a guest is to select the X to the right in the status column and remove them. You will not be able to make them a member or owner.
All team members see a message in the channel thread 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.
Guest Welcome Message
When a guest is invited to join a team, they receive a welcome email message. This message includes some information about the team and what to expect now that they're a member. The guest must accept the invitation by selecting Open Microsoft Teams in the email message before they can access the team and its channels.
At the bottom of the email welcome message, your guest will also see a link to download the app on their mobile device.
Mobile Device Setup and Sign in for Guests
For iPhone, iPad and Android devices, your guest will need to install the Teams app from the App Store or Google Play store.
- Teams Link for App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-teams/id1113153706
- Teams Link for Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.teams&hl=en_US
When signing in on a PC or app, it is likely that your guest will not have an Office 365 account, but the process of associating your guest’s email account (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) to a Microsoft account is automated. You can assume that this step will be skipped if the guest will use a Microsoft account (outlook.com). Your guest will be prompted to create a password or enter a code that is associated with their non-Microsoft account and then accept permissions: