Your Small Business Can Now Add Guests to Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams now lets you invite guests to all Office 365 commercial and educational accounts. What this means for your small businesses is you can add people from outside of your company to your team so they can collaborate no matter where they are.

Being able to expand the number of people you can collaborate with by providing guests access to Microsoft Teams is going to make your company more productive. In just six months, Teams has been adopted by more than 125,000 organizations, increasing the pool of talent and companies you can collaborate with.

This feature was driven by Teams customers. Lori Wright, general manager for Microsoft Teams, said on the company blog, “Guest access has been one of the top requested features for Teams among our customers, and we’ve been working hard to get it right.” 

Add Guests to Microsoft Teams

Giving guest access was finally added as a feature to Teams after Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) was able to address teamwork, security, compliance and IT manageability.

According to Wright, today anyone with an Azure Active Directory can be added as a guest in Teams. She goes on to say the feature will be expanded to everyone with an existing Microsoft Account, which addresses the teamwork component.

Regarding security and compliance, Teams uses enterprise-grade features. Accounts are managed through Azure Active Directory B2B Collaboration with conditional access policies when guests are given permission. This includes adaptive machine learning algorithms, heuristics, multi-factor authentication and more.

When it comes to IT manageability, Teams allows IT personnel to manage how guests participate within the Office 365 environment. Administrators can view, add or revoke a guest’s access to the host tenant.

Wright adds, “Now Office 365 users can add people from outside their company to a team, so guests can participate in chats, join meetings, collaborate on documents, and more.” 

Availability

If you want to try guest access you have to sign in to Teams, which you can do here. You can get more information on enabling guest access in Microsoft Teams from a help and support article here.

Image: Microsoft

This article, "Your Small Business Can Now Add Guests to Microsoft Teams" was first published on Small Business Trends