Microsoft Teams Gets “Guest Access”

Newly Improved Microsoft Teams

Ever since Microsoft Teams became generally available in January this year, guest access has been one of the top requested features.

Today, the rollout of guest access to all Office 365 commercial and education customers is going live meaning that Office 365 Team users can now add people from outside their company to a team, so that these “guests” can participate in chats, join meetings, collaborate on documents.

Starting today, anyone with an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account can be added as a guest into a Microsoft Teams. In coming months, Microsoft will be adding the ability for anyone with a Microsoft Account (MSA) to be added as a guest in Teams. If the guest doesn’t have an existing MSA, they will be directed to create a free account using their current corporate or consumer email address, such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com.

Even more secure

Security and compliance is built in – In Teams, guest accounts are added and securely managed within Azure AD through Azure AD B2B Collaboration. This enables enterprise-grade security, like conditional access policies for guest user access. Azure AD also uses adaptive machine learning algorithms and heuristics to detect anomalies and suspicious incidents, enabling mitigation or remediation actions, such as multi-factor authentication, to be triggered as appropriate. Guest user content and activities are under the same compliance and auditing protection as the rest of Office 365.

Guest Access IS optional – Microsoft have made Guest access in Teams optioning 0- giving IT the ability to centrally manage how guests participate within their Office 365 environment, providing consistency across application experiences in Office 365. IT Admins can easily view, add, or revoke a guest’s access to the host tenant.

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Rob Quickenden, Chief Strategy Officer at Cisilion