Forum Discussion
Guests and Chat in Teams
I'm hosting a large Teams meeting on my client with over 600 invitees none of whom are in my org. This is for the Parent Council at my kids' school.
There is no way to bulk load all of those contacts (yes I have tried the Power Automate desktop recorder. No, it did not work) into the Team except to do it one at a time. I don't want to create a 365 group because I don't want to clog my inbox with non-work email or to send unsuspecting parents and email form my business.
The last time I hosted a similar meeting I sent out the link to the meeting and attendees joined that way. However, they were unable to see or use Chat.
Given that I cannot make 600+ people Guest members of the Team, how can I make sure they can use chat?
Incidentally, my settings look like this
so I suspect this is to do with attendees joining via a link and not being actual Guest Members of the Team
onethreeone Hey! I believe you've figured this out yourself as you mentioned the delay. Yes, it takes quite some time for the policies to take effect.
For your information I have set up your settings (the ones you've attached) and created an anon account (Gmail). Scheduled a meeting and copied the Teams link into an email and sent it to the newly created anon address (no association at all with my tenant) and this anon user could join the meeting after being let in and participate in a chat.
In other words, as long as the settings are OK you don't have to worry about the guest accounts in AAD.
Hope that helps!
12 Replies
onethreeone Hello, I assume you used the Outlook add-in and sent out the Teams meeting link to all recipients with Outlook the last meeting? I haven't tried this myself but how about doing a "bulk add" to Azure AD? As soon as the invites are accepted they are populated in Azure AD as guests and you can go ahead and schedule a meeting with those users.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/external-identities/tutorial-bulk-invite#invite-guest-users-in-bulk
ex. add them to a Team and schedule a channel meeting as the limit is 300 for a non-channel meeting.
ChristianBergstrom thanks for coming back to me. No it was a rush job. Long story short: the head teacher was set to give us an update but the City Council won't allow their personnel to use anything other than Teams so I was drafted in at the last minute. All I could do was to send a link to the chair who sent out an email containing the link.
Attendees clicked the link to join and, even though my settings were set to allow Guests to chat most of them didn't even have the chat icon.
I really don't want to be adding 600 guests to my AD. I was hoping there might be some hints out there as to how to enable chat for folk joining the meeting from a link,
onethreeone Hello again! Just to follow up, could you verify some settings please.
- It was only a problem for a few? You said some anonymous users could use the chat? Or is it possible that they are already guests in your tenant?
- How does the meeting and messaging policies look like? Are they assigned to the organizer sending out the invite?
- You created the link last time around? How did the meeting options look like and how are your assigned policies set up?
I'm afraid I don't have time to verify anonymous chat right know to see what's happening. But can do it later on by creating an anon account somewhere. I'll update on the outcome!
