Whose Team Are You On? A Question about Fundamental Teams Design

[Joseph Nierenberg]

I've had two external collaborators add me to their Teams tab, which puts me on a Team within their own domains. I never log in to their domains. (They will have access to files in my SPO from time to time, but so far it has never gone the other way.) As a result, I have no idea what they are trying to communicate to me. I didn't even know they had added me, until I tried to explain to them how to use the Chat tab, not the Teams tab, with externals to avoid exactly this problem. So my question is how Teams should work with a web of collaborators who each have their own domain (or have no domain but are on Gmail.) If Alice adds Bob to her Teams tab, then Bob has to log in to Alice's domain to use Teams, which means that he can no longer see Carol, whom he added under his Chat tab. Is there no way for a user to see all of their external connections in Teams at once, other than for them all to use the Chat tab?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Currently no. Account management and managing this very thing is in the works at Microsoft. But for now, you are correct. If you switch tenants, your walled off into their tenant. If you want to have a central chat, then everyone needs to make sure they are using chat to federated contacts only and not guest accounts.

Uservoices related to this, using multiple accounts 

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17750851-i-want-to-use-multipl...

That is the main one, but there are a few others revolving around the same thing in the working on it state. Multiple accounts, multiple tenants etc. Is all something many of us complain about :). 

[#3]

Yeah! This is the way it works! Chat is when you talk from your tenant to another tenant, therefore no switching is required! When you are a guest you have to do this switch each time but you should receive notifications from other tenants at the top switch bar though! This is not always working as expected though!
Hopefully MS will improve this switching experience also!
What you can do is use different chrome profiles and have multiple teams clients open!

Adam

[#4]

Thanks. It is possible, though, to use the Chat tab to connect with an external who is a Guest in AAD. I don't know if that's what you meant by "guest accounts," but thought I'd add for clarity.

[#5]

Interesting idea. How use different profiles?

[#6]

Yes, if they are a guest, you can now still pick "Search externally for xxx" when trying to chat. In the past you couldn't do this, but at some point not long ago they made it where you could still reach out externally if they were a guest in your Teams environment

[#7]

here is a 3 minute long demo of using profiles in Chrome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdgatqDNGbs

Firefox has a Multi-account container add-in that works even better :)

[#8]

If you are working in one tenant, but get an alert in another you'll see the red counter appear on the list of tenants, so you know there's something for you to go look at. Sure it could be slicker, but it's still workable today.

Steven

[#9]

https://meetfranz.com/ works best :).

[#10]

agreed, i'm about to send him some $$

[#11]

That's intriguing. Will review.

If only there were a plug-in to interoperate with iMessage from a Windows workstation.... Half of my clients send me iMessage texts, which cannot easily be archived or referenced.