Forum Discussion
Teams Chat - Guest vs External
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.
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 😞
PhillipHamlyn You only need to know the email once, as it's then going to be in your chat list. Typically you start from an email anyway, and reply with IM or use the Teams menu to start a chat. Or if they are part of a shared channel with you then you can start a chat from there.
I'm not really with you about listing external people in a GAL, it's rarely kept accurate. Is that really how your users work with Outlook, every external person they talk to has been added to the GAL so they can 'find them' ?
Hi Steven, do you know if this was ever resolved or a feature released by Microsoft that addresses this issue? This is still an issue for us and it exactly matches what is being described here by everyone. And unfortunately your suggestion about you only need to know the email once is not applicable in all cases. For B2B partners that might have a short deletion retention policy, the entire chat history regularly gets deleted if the 2 parties don't message each other frequently, causing this issue over and over again over time. And it's not really a "GAL" thing, it's the fact that it attempts to autofill the guest account, it is just not realistic to train end users to not use the autofill. Hoping there's a new feature out there now that I'm not not finding that addresses this. Also as a side not, this is for 1 on 1 conversations, not channels so shared channels are not applicable in this scenario.
- Hi Steven,
Thanks for your reply. We dont keep 'true external' people in the GAL, but we do add colleagues in our federated companies into the GAL as guests (since we have a lot of GAL information about them and their place in the corp). If a user wanted to chat with a 'true external' I completely agree with your point; that we'd start with email address and go from there. However if a user starts a chat and wants to find a colleague who is a Guest (via GAL synchronisation) the model breaks - the colleague wont get any notification at all, whereas a 'true external' would.
I'm at a loss to see why Chat doesn't seem to send a Chat notification to a Guest but will to an External. I understand this all works if the Guest is currently logged into the senders Teams tenancy, but this is really unlikely (unless using the 'two teams open at once' trick). After all; why should a Guest be logged into the senders Tenancy ? These days they are pretty much guaranteed to have their own Teams tenancy and be working most of the time in that Tenancy. I have a lingering feeling that there is a magic setting somewhere that I have missed 🙂
