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Adding a Guest to a Team Demo
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Difficulty
Beginner
Duration
12m
Students
107
Ratings
5/5
Description

In this course, we will be going over providing access to external users in your Microsoft Teams Environment.

Learning Objectives

  • What Guest and External Access are and how they differ
  • How to manage both Guest access and External Access within your organization
  • And how to navigate the Teams admin center to manage these settings

Intended Audience

  • Users looking to learn more about Microsoft Teams administration settings

Prerequisites 

  • Have a basic understanding of administration in Microsoft Teams
Transcript

Now that we understand the differences between Guest and External Access, let's go through each of them and how you would actually enable or invite a guest. Now, here we are in Microsoft Teams. If we wanted to invite a guest to a Team Channel, we would actually have to be either a Team Owner or a Microsoft 365 Admin with Guest Access enabled. But assuming we meet those criteria, we simply need to navigate to the Team that we would like to invite the guest to, we'll utilize the Test Group. Click on these three ellipses here, and hit 'Add member'. From here, it will ask you to type the name or a group that you would like to add to the Team. If we would like to add a guest, we simply type their email at this point. 

So, we'll go ahead and do just that. Now, this is a fake email for the purposes of the demo, but as you can see, I got a pop-up asking if I would like to add the GuestUser9175 as a guest. I would simply click on that. Hit 'Add'. And now, that email has received a notification stating that they've been added to a Team as a guest, which they can then accept and then, join the Team's Channel and the conversation from there. And to quickly showcase what the actual invitation would look like on the receiving end of this, it will be an email from noreply@email.teams.microsoft.com and it will look something like this, where I can see the name of the group, who added me to the group, and I can go ahead and choose to open Microsoft Teams from there to accept.

It'll ask me if I want to launch the Teams app or just use the web app, but from there, it will actually bring me directly into the Team and I'll have access to everything just like I was if I was an actual member of this organization. Now, that's how you add a guest to a Team. But how do we actually adjust these settings for the guests in our environment? For that, we actually have to navigate on over to our Teams admin center. We then go over to our Users, and instead of Manage users, choose 'Guest access'. This is where we're going to get all of our settings for Guest access within Teams. First and foremost, we need to ensure that 'Allow guest access in Teams' is enabled, as if it's off, this is going to be redundant, so make sure Guest access is turned on if you want guests to be on in your environment. 

From there, you have a bunch of other options for your guests within Teams that you can adjust, such as Calling, Meetings, Messaging, and so on and so forth. Generally, whenever you have guests in Teams, you probably want them to collaborate and communicate with your organization pretty frequently, so many of these options you'll likely want to have set to on with the exception of maybe a few, such as GIFs and memes. If you wanted to turn any of this stuff off or adjust it, you simply hit the toggle button, and once that toggle is set, you can hit the 'Save' button in the bottom left corner, and all of those settings will be saved and updated within a couple of hours of this change.

 

About the Author
Students
8906
Courses
35
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Lee has spent most of his professional career learning as much as he could about PC hardware and software while working as a PC technician with Microsoft. Once covid hit, he moved into a customer training role with the goal to get as many people prepared for remote work as possible using Microsoft 365. Being both Microsoft 365 certified and a self-proclaimed Microsoft Teams expert, Lee continues to expand his knowledge by working through the wide range of Microsoft certifications.