External users only for meeting

[Khushi Shaikh]

Hello Team Gurus - We have partners whom with we did set up federation and allowed only their domain. Now their users are seamlessly accessing Teams participating and can access channels/Files/Apps. It's all working good.

Now we have requirement to allow users (with their consumer emails or org emails) to attend Team's Meeting. Just Meeting. We do NOT want them to Chat/Channel/Apps/Files access.

How go about this? Any resource or guidance much appreciated. Do we need to look into Guest or External Identities? 

Best Regards,

Khushi

[#2 · Accepted solution]

You just update meeting settings to allow it. It lets anyone with a meeting link to join your meetings. They won’t have access to channels etc.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/meeting-settings-in-teams

[#3]

@Khushi Shaikh Hello, let me add some additional context to the previous reply.

When you federate (external access) there's no access to Teams resources. If you use allow or block lists with external access you have to consider that you either block all besides or allow all besides the list. That's also described in Teams admin center when you set this up. If you want someone to access resources in a team you usually enable Guest access as that's more permissive.

As you say you've federated with full access to everything I'm thinking that you might mean that you've enabled Cross-tenant access settings in preview? (that's B2B collaboration).

For teams meetings you can invite just anyone, they don't even have to use a Teams account to join a Teams meeting. But if you're using allow/block lists for domains you probably want to allow "anonymous join" which I believe @Chris Webb is referring to so anyone with access to the link can join your Teams meetings.

[#4]

Thank you @Chris Webb I will look into meeting settings. Any security concern in setting Anonymous users can join a meeting? Any drawbacks? I need to fully understand the hidden consequences before turning this ON.

[#5]

You are correct @ChristianJBergstorm We enabled Cross-tenant access for our partners to collaborate and they can fully access Teams they just need to switch to our tenant in teams.

With this anonymous access setting, does it means we don't need to manage accounts of users (sending email invite to consumer emails like gmail.com or yahoo.com) joining meeting as anonymous users? How does this works? I am so confused with guest users vs anonymous users.

[#6]

It literally means, anyone that has the link to the meeting can join. No login required. You can just use web browser to join. Or anyone logged into Teams can as well. Not much more to it than that.