In our previous blog, we introduced the first two Cross-Cloud Collaboration capabilities between Microsoft WW Teams and 21Vianet Teams:

• Cross Cloud Interoperability
• Cross Cloud Teams anonymous Meeting Join

We hope you found the features useful to facilitate your communication across WW and 21Vianet clouds using Microsoft Teams. As we said in the previous blog, we recently launched the other two features that allow collaboration across WW Teams and 21Vianet Teams:

• Cross Cloud Authenticated Meeting (CCM)
• Cross Cloud Guest Access (CCGA)

Now, users in different Microsoft clouds can use these features to participate in meetings, chat, call, and share resources with each other. Those features will elevate collaboration by allowing users from different cloud environments to seamlessly join Teams meetings and collaborate, ensuring security through authentication processes. In this blog post, we will describe what these features are, how they function, and how to activate them for your organization.

Cross Cloud Authenticated Meeting

Cross-cloud authenticated meeting join (CCM) delivers the ability for a Teams user to join a meeting hosted in another cloud while signed into their account in their home tenant. This feature provides the meeting host the ability to validate the identities of meeting participants without having to explicitly grant those participants any access to the host tenant.

To use Cross Cloud Meeting, both the meeting organizer and the meeting participants need to have the feature turned on by their admins.

• Go to Teams Admin Center (TAC), find Cross-Cloud meetings under Meeting Settings
• Add the other tenant IDs and configure the Inbound/Outbound connections to enable and control this functionality for the tenant.

For detailed instructions, please follow this article: Meet with people in other Microsoft 365 cloud environments - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn

When both sides have finished setting up, users can invite and participate in the meeting hosted in the other cloud.

For example, a WW Teams user joining a 21Vianet Teams meeting with fully respecting his home tenant’s authentication.

Cross Cloud Guest Access

Teams Cross Cloud Guest Access (CCGA) extends existing Guest Access functionality allowing a user to participate in rich collaboration experiences in teams, channels, documents and Teams meetings between tenants across Microsoft clouds. Guests are able to participate in a full collaboration experience including audio/video, screen share, Channel file share and both 1:1 and 1: many chats. These features are enabled through the Microsoft Entra ID B2B feature and the newly released Cross Tenant Access Settings, which can enable trust between tenants and between Microsoft clouds.

Just like the Cross Cloud Authenticated Meeting configuration, to enable the Cross Cloud Guest Access capability between WW Teams and 21Vianet Teams, both the tenants in the two different clouds must have the feature turned on by their tenant admins. Below are the highlight steps:

• Enable Guest Access
• Configure the Cross-tenant connections with another  Microsoft cloud
• Add the other organizations and configure the inbound/outbound settings

See detailed instructions on this article: Collaborate with guests from other Microsoft 365 cloud environments | Microsoft Learn

It is like the Guest Access feature in the Cloud.

• The host team can then add the guest user by using their email address.

• The guest user will receive an email invitation with a link to join the team or channel resource. They can join the team or channel by clicking on the link, or by using the Teams app in the other cloud.

• The guest user will have a separate identity and profile in the other cloud, and they can switch between their home cloud and the guest cloud in the Teams app.                         

In conclusion, Cross Cloud Meeting and Cross Cloud Guest Access are two new features that further improve the cross-cloud collaboration between WW Teams and 21Vianet Teams. These features enable users in different clouds to participate in meetings, chat, call, and use shared resources with each other.

Give it a try!