Microsoft Teams allowing Guest user access?

It seems that Microsoft have recently amended Microsoft Teams (their collaboration tool within Office 365) so that “guest users”, that is to say users who are not part of your organisation’s Office 365 subscription, can be added to Teams.  If so, that is a very welcome development, because:

  • Microsoft Teams is a great collaboration tool
  • it means that external users (e.g. clients, suppliers, or simply people from other organisations) who want to can share information or work together on a project with your internal team.

Here is an example of using Polly (a polling and survey chat bot), to add polls to conversations in Teams:

UsingAutomatedBotPollyToAddPollsToTeamConversationsMay2018

(Adding a poll once Polly has been installed is as easy as typing @polly, pressing Tab, then entering your question followed by the question mark, then typing your desired poll options separated by commas).

Why do I only say it “seems” that Guest users can be added to Teams at this stage? Because so far it has not been working for us: the external users’ credentials are rejected when they try to log in to Teams.

Am currently trying to resolve this with Microsoft Office 365 support.

4 comments

  1. Have raised this again with Office365 support after something went wrong during our previous support request.

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  2. Update: am still trying to resolve this with Office 365 support. They seem to be doing their best, but in my opinion, this feature (allowing Guest access to Teams) does not seem to have been properly tested. They have been unable to get it to work for us, despite multiple emails and one phone call support…

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  3. Problem now solved after a lot of emails/phone calls with support (who have really done their best to sort it out). It seems it is not enough to add a guest user to a team from the Office 365 portal and for the user to have a valid Outlook.com or Office356 or Azure Active Directory account, they also *must* receive the invitation email that is sent out when they are added to a team and click on the link within that email. Unless they do that (and accept the terms and conditions), they won’t be able to log in to teams.microsoft.com and instead the browser displays the url: https://teams.microsoft.com/_#/licenseError?errorCode=UserLicenseNotPresentForbidden.

    This behaviour (requiring the user to click on a url – which is customised for each user so can’t be shared with other users – within an invitation email) is not normally required for app services (the name for standard websites within Azure) which are protected by Azure Active Directory. So Microsoft Teams needs slightly different treatment in that regard.

    So Guest users can now be added to our Teams, which is great! I really like this part of Office 365.

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