How to add an External user to your Team?
Sometimes your regular team might need to undertake some work with people outside of their organisation, like a client, supplier, or consultant. If you are using Microsoft Teams on a day-to-day basis to manage projects, collaborate and communicate then it’s important to include all Team members in your group, whether they are within your Organisation or outside of it. Inviting someone from outside of the organisation may not appear straight forward. Here’s a quick ‘how to’ to help you understand this process!
- Go to Microsoft Teams and select your team -that you would like to add a guest to.
- Select ‘More options’ and find the button ‘Add member’.
- In the window that will pop up, enter the email address of your guest. Your guest can have any type of email account but will need to create a Microsoft account using that email address.
- Once that is done, add your guest’s name that you would like to display in calls, chats and in the team.
- If the ‘’We didn’t find any matches.’’ box comes up, you need to enable guest sharing in admin settings. Head to the bottom of the article for instructions.
- Click add and it is done!
Once your guest is in the team, you need to make sure that you manage the access to Teams documents, channels, resources, chats, and applications to determine what your guest users can and cannot see. To control these elements, you can use Azure AD to change them. This also allows you to create recurring access reviews. These are important as they allow you to fully collaborate with users inside of your business as well as those external ones. They help you to keep control over accesses of all the users and prevent any compromises.
Using access review can also allow you to check how many of your users have admin access and to what documents, if there are any external guests that have completed their role and have not been removed from the teams and any internal employees that no longer need access to the resources.. There are many more possibilities and reason to use recurring access reviews, but we will touch on these in a separate article!
To allow guest access to a Team:
- Sign into the Microsoft Teams admin centre.
- Select Org-wide settings and then Guest access.
- Set Allow guest access in Microsoft Teams to On.
- Under Calling, Meeting, and Messaging, select On or Off for each capability, depending on what you want to allow for guest users.
