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Adjust External Access Settings 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 how to adjust Guest access along with those settings, let's showcase how to do the same thing with external settings. So, similar to Guest access we would navigate over to the Users and the Teams admin center, only this time instead of choosing Guest access we instead choose External access. From here, you can clearly see we are in external settings and can also see the options for Teams and Skype for business users in external organizations. This right here is the main option for adjusting external settings within your organization. For example, you can see right now that my setting is set to block all external domains. However, if I want to enable external options, I can swap it instead to allow all external domains. This enables the External access within my domain and enables all the benefits provided with External access. However, in certain situations, you may want to be more specific with your External access policies. In this case, instead of allowing all domains, you could instead choose to allow or block specific domains. For example, if I wanted to only allow a certain domain, I could simply choose 'Allow only specific external domain'.

Once I choose that option, I can then add the external domain to the list that I would like to allow. So, if I click here on 'Allow domain', it will then ask me what domain to allow. Just for the sake of the example, I'll go ahead and choose Microsoft.com and hit 'Done'. You can then see once I've added this, I now have one allowed domain that can use External Access within my organization. It is important to remember that if an organization blocks a specific domain, and all domains not specifically blocked will be allowed. And on the flip side of that scenario, if an organization allows a specific domain, then all domains not specifically allowed will be blocked. Keep that in mind when setting up your External access policies to figure out what works best for you. Once you've allowed all specific external domain, we can then scroll down to the other settings we have such as Teams accounts not managed by organizations. This effectively allows Team members to communicate with users outside of our organization, and on the flip side, you can also enable or disable unmanaged external users from contacting internal managed users. You can either enable or disable this depending on your needs simply by toggling either option on or off.

And then finally, we have Skype users which allows your organization to communicate with users who are only on Skype rather than just on Teams. But once you have all of these settings set and how you like them, you click the 'Save' button and you'll get a little prompt that says it'll take a couple of hours before you see those changes.

 

About the Author
Students
8994
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.