Best Practices for adding a large number of guest users to a Team

Steel Contributor

One of the departments at our University is planning to use Teams to host a virtual conference in January. This will involve adding 500+ guests, so the GUI method is not going to be practical. I'd prefer to use Powershell to do it since it's fairly easy to pull in lists of emails from a CSV file and loop through them.

 

The MicrosoftTeams module in Powershell does have an "Add-TeamUser" cmdlet, but it requires that the user already exist in Azure AD (either a native user or a guest who has been invited). OK, so there's another cmdlet in the AzureAD module - "New-AzureADMSInvitation" - that can be used to invite them.

 

So, my plan is to run New-AzureADMSInvitation to send the invitations, then Add-TeamUser to add them to the Team. Here's the problem: if they haven't accepted the invitation, the typical "You've been added to a Team" email is not sent. So, I somehow need to be able to know when/if they accept the invitation, so I can then add them to the Team. 

 

Unless there's some better method for this that I'm totally overlooking or unaware of. Also, to be up-front, I am not a Teams or Global admin, so don't have access to the Teams admin center. I do have a SharePoint admin role, but that doesn't really help in this situation.

1 Reply

You can check the invitation/redemption status via PowerShell, so you can postpone adding to the team until that point, if sending the email is that important. Also, you can bulk invite guest users via the Azure AD portal: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/external-identities/tutorial-bulk-invite