Forum Discussion
Teams Chat - Guest vs External
We find that Teams Chat to External users of another tenancy Teams (using their full email name) notifies them within their Teams that there is an incoming message and allows them to participate in a...
PhillipHamlyn Agreed this isn't a great experience at the moment.
Have you looked at Shared Channels yet? It's just entered Public Preview and goes some of the way to removing this issue. Shared Channels replace guest access with direct access, when you share a channel with an external party they see that channel in their regular Teams environment, and don't need to tenant switch to access it. They don't get a second chat experience, everything stays in their tenant.
Think of Shared Channels as the nearest equivalent to federated chat, everyone stays in their own tenant but is allowed to use channels or the existing chat.
Hi Stephen,
Yes - we are eagerly awaiting Shared Channels - however it doesn't address the Chat instant messaging issues, as far as I have read. I agree that we would naturally replace our Guest users with Externals when sharing channels within the corp; however when a user uses the Chat IM function they are still going to have to ignore Guest users and have to type in the users full email address to chat to them. My frustration is "thats what GALS are for" - so the user can find people and message them without needing to keep knowing their email address 😞
Yes - we are eagerly awaiting Shared Channels - however it doesn't address the Chat instant messaging issues, as far as I have read. I agree that we would naturally replace our Guest users with Externals when sharing channels within the corp; however when a user uses the Chat IM function they are still going to have to ignore Guest users and have to type in the users full email address to chat to them. My frustration is "thats what GALS are for" - so the user can find people and message them without needing to keep knowing their email address 😞