Organizations using Microsoft Teams are no longer limited to the people within their organization with the latest Teams update Microsoft has announced.
Guest Access has now rolled out to all Office 365 commercial and education customers, meaning that those Office 365 users can now add people from outside their company to a team. Guests will be able to essentially function as any normal team member with access to features like chats, meetings, collaborating on documents, etc.
In order to be added as a guest in Teams, users must have an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account. This includes anyone with an account across Microsoft’s commercial cloud services and third party Azure AD integrated apps. Microsoft says that currently there are over 870 million of these user accounts out in the wild.
At the moment those with Microsoft Accounts won’t be able to be added through those accounts, but Microsoft insists that it’ll be adding that ability in the future. Once that update is a reality, anyone can sign up for a Microsoft Account with any corporate or consumer email address and then be added to a Team.
Once added, IT managing Teams can manage what individual guests have access to in a similar manner to how one would manage accessibility throughout Office 365 as a whole.
For adding guests to Teams, Microsoft received the feedback that it should come with enterprise-grade security and compliance assurances loud and clear, saying that guest user content and activities are under the same compliance and auditing protection as the rest of Office 365. Guest accounts are added and managed within Azure AD via Azure AD B2B Collaboration. This means that guest access automatically enables security such as conditional access policies for these guests.
Earlier this year, our office went hands on with Microsoft Teams. You can check out our definitive review here
