How to Enable the Guest access in Microsoft Teams

18 / November / 2022

Guest access is quite essential when it comes to delivering tasks that might be outsourced or deployed to partners.

Here's my quick guide to ensure a seamless external collaboration experience

Manchikatla Anudeep

A Quick Guide to Setup Microsoft Teams

A guest is someone who isn’t an employee or member of your organization. They don’t have any work account with your organization.

Let me tell you one example, guest access includes anyone who is not of your organization and can be added as a guest in Teams. It means that anyone with a business account like an azure active directory account or with a consumer email account as outlook.com, Gmail.com or others can participate as a guest in Microsoft Teams.

What is Guest Access?

In your organization, guest access allows teams to collaborate with people outside your organization by granting them access to existing teams as well as channels in the Teams. Anyone with a business account like Outlook, Gmail, can participate as guests in guests and they can access chats, files or meetings.

Compare with Team member & Guest Access

Permissions in Teams	Team Member	Guest Access
Create a channel	Yes	Yes
Participate in a private chat conversation	Yes	Yes
Participate in a channel conversation	Yes	Yes
Delete or edit messages	Yes	Yes
Create a team	Yes	No
Discover & join a public team	Yes	No
Add Apps	Yes	No
Create meetings or access for schedules meeting	Yes	No
Become team owner	Yes	No
Creating tenant-wide & teams or channels guest access polices	Yes	No

In Teams you can add External users to an O365 group as a guest, guest permissions in the O365 groups slightly differ and you need to grant permission or access to outside of Teams.

Enable Guest Access in Microsoft Teams

Before adding a guest access, first need to have enabled as an org-wide setting in Teams. By default, it turned off.

To turn on and configure guest access in Microsoft Teams you need to be a Global Administrator or a Team Administrator to make these changes.

Step-by-Step for How to add Guest Access in Microsoft Teams.

First Go to the Microsoft Teams admin Center, on the left Navigation select Org-wide settings, & click on Guest access.
Switch ON the Toggle button for Allow guest access in Teams.
In the Team admin center, we can Enable feature like calling, Meeting & Messaging for the Guest access.
When you scroll down see in the Messaging field, you can enable depending on what you want to access for the Guest member in the Teams.
In the same page where you enable Guest access, you need to scroll down & then click on the Save Button.
After clicking on Save button you can see important popup message, you may to wait it up to 2 hours to 24 hours for your changes to take effect.

In the Team admin center, we have done with the Enabling a feature to add Guest access in the Microsoft Teams. It’s time to add Guest member in Microsoft Teams which is already created a Team or channel to access those.

Add Guest Member into Microsoft Teams

Team owner in the Microsoft Teams can add guest in your teams.

Go to Microsoft Teams and find team that your created.
Select Team name & Click on Ellipse ˙˙˙ > Add Members.
Enter the guest’s email address those have with a business or Gmail account they can join your team as a Guest member.

Add your guest name, after added you can change name there is option Edit guest information you can type a friendly name for them.

After accepting the invitation, the guest member can access teams and channels, and they can receive and respond to the channel messages.
They can access files in the channel, join in meetings, chat conversation and more.

Set up guest user permissions

Team admin as well as Team owner can restrict guest permission, if you go to Team name list & click on Ellipse ˙˙˙ > Manage team. Then go to settings tab & Click on Guest Permission, you can check or uncheck the guest permission. You can choose to allow the guest permission like create update & delete channels.