Forum Discussion
External Guests being invited to channel meetings
ongrieh , stevecousins I have been chasing this problem as well. What I have figured out is that behind the scenes of the Team is a MS365 group and all Guest Users are automatically designated as 'Subscribers' of the group, regardless of team setting on "AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents" and "AutoSubscribeNewMembers". I presume this is because they can't directly interact with the Team/Group and self-subscribe or join channel meetings ad-hoc. However, this is not ideal because guests then get invited to _every_ channel meeting without explicitly inviting them.
The only way I can find to remove guests as subscribers is via PowerShell. You can view group/team Subscribers with Get-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity [team name] -LinkType Subscribers. You should see the Guest accounts listed as 'MailUser' recipient types with #EXT# on the name. You can remove these with Remove-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity [team name] -LinkType Subscribers -Links [Name]. Allow a few moments for the subscriber list to update.
This does not remove guests from their Member role, but now they won't be email-invited to every channel meeting. I haven't confirmed it yet, but it is possible that Guest Accounts get re-subscribed from some unknown trigger. That plus additional guests getting auto-subscribed necessitates creating a script to routinely unsubscribe guests.
Microsoft should fix Teams to honor "AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents" and "AutoSubscribeNewMembers" on Guest accounts.
Tiago RoxoMicrosoft
"All members of the team are automatically invited."
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/tutorial-meetings-in-teams?tutorial-step=2
"Note: When you have a meeting in a channel, everyone in the team will be able to see it and join it in that channel. "
Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/schedule-a-meeting-in-teams-943507a9-8583-4c58-b5d2-8ec8265e04e5- This is not strictly true. If I enter named channel members in the 'Required' field, only those entered in are notified, however, everybody who is a Guest is also invited even though they are not in the 'required' field. As an example, if I had a team with 4 members, Name1, Name2, Name3 and Guest1 (Guest1 is the Guest in the Team)
I then create a channel meeting and enter Name2 in the Required field. When the invite is sent, the invitation will be sent to Name2 AND Guest1. You are correct, anybody in the team can join and see the meeting (which is expected behavior) but the invitation should only be sent to those in the Required field.
Does this make sense 🙂stevecousins I totally agree. Tiago Roxo you did not quite get the whole picture of the problem and its consequences here 😉
Especially the way the system behaves differently between users of the own and users of a different organization (so called "Guest").
ChristianBergstrom I understand that everybody can see the channel meeting and can join is they choose to. My problem is that external (Guest) members of the Team that are NOT in the Required Attendee (below) list are also being invited. Normal members (non-guests) that are not in the required attendee list are not seeing the same behavior.
- Hi stevecousins, same issue here...I tested it with a college from a different organisation. This behavior is very annoying and frustrating because it leads to very much confusion especially between different organizations 😞
Ok, I understand. My best guess here is the fact that guests doesn’t have the ability to create meetings or access schedules and therefore are being notified about the channel meeting.
You can always ask the Microsoft support for an official answer by creating a support ticket (or someone with access can do it for you if you’re not an admin).btw, this is a great article on the topic https://office365itpros.com/2020/03/31/invitations-teams-meetings/amp/
