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 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,
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 🙂
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 🙂
