Forum Discussion
Using Teams with multiple organizations
GraniteStateColin Work in progress https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/d256e0f6-262e-ec11-b6e6-00224827bbc2
It’s not always necessary to be a guest user in another tenant, and then cross-tenant access settings (direct connect/shared channels) are perfect. No need to switch organizations while having access to every shared channel with posts, notifications, files, apps etc.
ChristianJBergstrom, that link is a good sign. It looks like I had posted a comment in there a few months ago, but had lost track of it, so THANKS! However, the text of your reply seems to again completely miss the point. You're looking at this from the point of view of an IT admin managing your tenant and figuring out how you can get access to people. That's the wrong perspective and the reason you're missing the point.
Here's the most common scenario driving the tens of thousands of requests for MS to fix this: you work with 2 (or more) completely unrelated companies. They each add you with a full user account to their tenant, because that's their standard practice for their people. Maybe one or both makes you owner of a few teams in their tenant or even sets you as an admin and expects you to create your own Teams as you need them (e.g., I need to create a new cross-functional team in Teams for each major project I run). Cross-tenant access is not an option. That would require the IT admin to do something special. If I'm a contractor, I would NEVER ask my client to trust my account from another client, nor would I ask them to add my personal email address to their Teams access grants. Those both draw negative attention and undermine my value as a contractor.
In my case, I'm an admin in Teams at multiple tenants. In all cases, they would never do this for me if my email domain differed from the tenant domain name. In one I'm a global SharePoint Owner, in another I'm just given access to create new Teams, but can't change settings for other users.
Further, take these 2 situations that have no other solution as far as I know:
1. Integration with Outlook Calendar for sending Meeting invites with a working "Join Now" button in the Outlook calendar. Currently, it's only possible to schedule a Teams meeting from Outlook for the Tenant currently signed-in to Teams. That's terrible. I need to be able to schedule Teams meetings from Outlook across multiple tenants.
2. Teams VoIP. Telephone calling from Teams ("Calls" in the left navigation in Teams) works great to place a call by clicking on a phone number anywhere in Windows. Fantastic feature and one of dozens of examples why Teams is in a class by itself compared to limited systems like Slack and Google's meager offerings. But as with #1, this currently ONLY works with the currently single signed-in Team. In my case, I only have Teams telephone calling active in 1 tenant, which means that if that tenant is not the active tenant in Desktop Teams (because I needed to sign out and sign in to a different tenant for all the reasons we've been reviewing here), then all telephone links are effectively broken, just reporting "Sorry, we couldn't connect you." and another message, "Couldn't complete the call. With your calling license, you can only call people within your organization. Talk to your IT admin to change your license."
- Thanks for your advice.
- You better add your vote on the above link then. Updated 13 days ago.
- Well, thanks for your suggestions which I do appreciate – but that's exactly the problem: I need full access to several teams and channels in FOUR (different) organizations – several times a day (local, regional, business and NGO, sometimes even exercise of authority, besides where I'm invited as a guest), not to mention we have been advised to no not use Microsoft Teams, because of security issues (GDPR secrecy, no servers abroad etc.) when holding certain meetings, respecting patient safety in specific jurisdictions.
- Well, it's possible to do all that using shared channels. I'm working with loads of tenants too. It's only necessary for me to switch when I need access to an entire team in another tenant. Not perhaps applicable for your use case though and then you just have to wait until they sort it out.
"Thank you for your continued feedback and patience. Support for multiple accounts is a top priority. We are actively working on it and look forward to providing an update on timing."
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-811a-ed11-b83e-000d3a4d9c20 - No, I am legally employed(!) or contracted by four organizations, with responsibility to set up meetings, upload documents, and coordinate work, in all four. (In addition to that I am also a guest in even more organizations.)
- Do you have to be a guest user in these organizations? Perhaps shared channels could replace that so you can collaborate with these externals without leaving your own org?
- It seems to me Microsoft is hopelessly behind with obsolete organizational thinking and immature products. I work(!) for four different organizations and have to switch several times a day. Sometimes I even have to log out THREE times – from the same account – in order to get Temas to let go of the old organization to be able to log in to the new one.
It has been so tiresome that I automated these tasks and simply let my computer repeat the procedure until Teams had successfully logged out from the old account and then, by itself, could log in to the desired one, so I, at least, can do other things in the meantime.
(BTW, I teach programming and automation part time, and have told my students: You won't get approved if you're not coming up with better solutions than Microsoft Teams.) - I do agree with that. Teams really has no good alternatives. People will mention Slack, Zoom, Google's offerings, Atlassian Suite, etc. but each of those does just a small piece of what Teams does, and you need many of those in a messy hodgepodge to achieve what Teams does with elegant simplicity. That's like telling a Word user to just use Notepad++ (plus needing a dozen other web tools to get part of the functionality in Word). And MS is adding features and improvements to Teams at an impressive pace. If they really do provide the multi-tenant simultaneous use later this year, I'm sure I'll quickly forget this was ever a concern. However, they've pushed it off multiple times and described the problem as solved when they added support 1 tenant and 1 personal account, so I'm skeptical until I see it or at least hear reports from Insiders that this feature is working in testing.
GraniteStateColin Preaching to the choir mate 😉 I am a member (guest user) in multi tenants so understand your posts. Simply adding that organizations don't always have to add people as guests (B2B) for proper collaboration. I don't work for Microsoft but at least they are trying to do something about it and "second half of 2022" isn't that far away, even though it seems that this specific feature probably would rollout at the end of the year.
