Forum Discussion
Using Teams with multiple organizations
I am a paying customer for teams and since personal accounts are restricted there is no way anymore to switch between companies. When will this be solved? Otherwise I will find an alternative very soon.
I wanted to make sure that everyone in this thread was aware that the Preview of the new Teams client now includes the ability to log in to multiple accounts at the same time. This then allows you to
- Be alerted to new chats in another tenant, and to have chats from multiple tenants open at the same time.
- Join meetings from the most relevant tenant that you are a member of, so for example if I have an account in tenant B while still in tenant A as I join the meeting my meeting window is in tenant B.
- I can switch the main Teams window between accounts in a few seconds.
It's a big step up, and as you can see it's required the complete rewrite and rearchitecture of the client to make it possible. The new client is available to any tenant through Public Preview, read about it more at Introducing the new Microsoft Teams, now in preview - Microsoft Community Hub
GraniteStateColin Well, yes, that is what the new client does and when it's finished later this year it will of course support all the custom app features that the current client supports.
Also to be clear, no one on this thread works for Microsoft, we are community volunteers who work with Teams.
GraniteStateColin Thank you for stating the need so clearly! I fear that most of the people involved are truly "geeks", who look at this from a programming/security side, are Microsoft employees who don't experience the world of contracting, and just don't see how much of a priority it should be to make Teams more like it's competitors like Zoom, where it is not for an internal team only.
Steven Collier, I love Teams. It has made life much, much easier overall. However, comments like yours about shared and guest access are purely from the IT admin's perspective. They miss the problem facing the independent contractor who has to work for multiple clients, each with its own unrelated security model. If I work with 5 companies, each using Teams and each providing me a separate account on their tenant, I need the Teams client on my various PC's to support 5 separate tenant logins and be able to receive real-time notices/alerts, including badges in the Taskbar, from all of them at the same time. I can't tell my client to provide special IT work to support me by creating a Guest account or authorizing another company's accounts (possibly a competitor's). I need to adhere to each client's existing security model, which typically means using a different account provided by each tenant.
Outlook added this capability in the ~2010 version (give or take a version). The ability to have connections to multiple tenants all active at the same time is essential.
The new Teams client may support this, but I can't personally use it yet, because it lacks support for third-party apps. I need those for receiving SMS/text messages in Teams. As soon as that is available in the new Teams, I'll jump over.- MikeButash, Slack does a few simple things better than Teams, much like bicycle is better in certain very specific ways than an airplane. Teams as vastly more feature rich and capable than Slack, but if you happen to need the specific function of Slack, sure in those niche cases, it will be the better solution.
- I didn't ask to copy Discord security, just the UI implementation. What's so difficult or bad about simply displaying all the Teams you as a person joined in a single window without having to switch?
- This is why people use Slack over Teams. Microsoft tried to copy Slack, but still comes up short.
MichaelDelpach Which is how Shared Channel access works today if a company uses that model instead of guest access. Sure there are complexities, with it and improvements coming, but it allows two tenants to access the same Teams.
The reason that quite a few orgs don't adopt it is that they don't like the security implications that this model brings, and prefer having two separate identities which is the tenant/identity shifting that improves significantly with the new client.
There's no shortage of options. Discord wouldn't meet many companies security requirements by the same measure.
- This is a step in the right direction however, just like in Discord, my dream is that Microsoft Teams one day shows all the Teams I have joined to in a single window, regardless of what tenancy/organisation I am joined from. For example, if I am a Member/Owner in 2 Teams from Company AAA, and 3 Teams from Company BBB, then Microsoft Teams should show all 5 in a single window, in the left hand navigation pane. I don't know how to express this request any further.
So much for Microsoft Hearts Linux eh? Glad Linux is your best seller in azure though!
MikeButash Mac will come later this year alongside Windows, for Linux you are out of luck as Microsoft discontinued support for the client app on that platform last year so you'll need to stick to using browser Teams in the future.
StevenC365: Only half a decade too late but ok - now when are the 2nd class citizens like Linux and Mac going to see this with the now hopefully less crappy Teams rewrite? As a full-time Linux user, I hate and dread nothing more than when customers send me Teams invites, I typically request using my Zoom as something that actually works for everyone.
