Forum Discussion
Can I give an external user access to log in to our Teams and use chat?
Steve Whitcher No, the guest account must be a member of at least one Team. Imagine if some users should only access a file or SharePoint site and if all of them could chat to each other 🙂
As others stated, the guest needs to be invited to at least one Team. After that, they will be able to chat with other members (or guests) of that Team using the Chat function, but they will not (in my experience) be able to Chat with other users.
- I'm no licensing expert, but maybe you could assign them a Teams license? Or, if they are from a specific domain (e.g.: gmail.com), you could set up federated authentication. Again, I'm no expert on that, so I can't tell you how to do it. This page may help: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-external-access
Steve Whitcher AFAIK not for guest users, they must be member of any Team to chat with other users within your organization. Another option would be to enable federation, then you can chat with external users that are using Teams and Skype for Business / Skype Personal without adding them to your tenant. These are the only options I'm aware off.
Dominik Hoefling Just to be clear, if I had to add the guest to a team to get them access to chat, that wouldn't be a big deal. Based on what Chad_V_Kealey said though, even if the user is a member of a Team they don't have access to the chat with other users in our organization. If that's the case, it sounds like adding these users as guests isn't going to work for me.
Thanks!
Steve Whitcher that's not true actually. As a consultant, I'm a guest in almost 10 tenants and as long as I'm a member of any Team, I can chat with every user in that specific organization, independent which members are in a specific team.
You can easily test it: add your personal account to a Team, switch to your organizations tenant and then try to chat with your organizational account - it will work.