Invite to channel for conversation only

[MGSpaceCaptain]

One of the issues that we're seeing with Teams adoption in our organization is defined teams often want to invite an individual from another department for participation in one single conversation post only. There doesn't seem an easy way to just see see or include others on a conversation without making them a member or guest.

For example, in a discussion about a new office, I wanted to ask the Telecom rep for his suggestion on what model phone we would use. I don't need this person in my team or want them to see all content.

[#2]

It would be nice to be able to add a "Chat" to a Team channel as a thread that anyone in the Team could participate in. It's not something you can do today, but I would def. take to microsoftteams.uservoice.com and look for something similar or create one. I would vote on that, as it could be very useful.

You can kind of do it now if you use e-mail and Mailclark, you can have some two way discussion externally into a Team, so you can check that out as an alternative.

[#3]

Thanks I will look into that as this is consistently a pain to include external individuals in discussions without making the members of the team. There also doesn't seem to be a way to create a chat from a team, so I find myself adding members of the team one by one to have less formal dialogue. we're supposed to be able to chat with members listed in tags also, but I can't get that to work.

[#4]

@Chris Webb 

Good feedback - definitely a UV item.  We haven't heard many requests for this so would love to know more about the scenario - be sure to provide that context in the UserVoice item.

[#5]

@MGSpaceCaptain tags are only for subsets of members in your Team. They are similar to @ mentions, where anyone assigned the tag in the Team Settings > Members with the tags will get a notification when mentioned if they have that tag. 

Usually group chats are used to include people that don't need to be in your team to make a decision on something, but unfortunately you cannot group chat with external chat. If we could get that federation to have group chats then that might alleviate some of that, but it def. would be nice to create a "group chat" inside of a Team somehow. I'll come up with a uservoice for it when I get a few to sit down with it.