SOLVED

Guests and Chat in Teams

Brass Contributor

I'm hosting a large Teams meeting on my client with over 600 invitees none of whom are in my org. This is for the Parent Council at my kids' school.

 

There is no way to bulk load all of those contacts (yes I have tried the Power Automate desktop recorder. No, it did not work) into the Team except to do it one at a time. I don't want to create a 365 group because I don't want to clog my inbox with non-work email or to send unsuspecting parents and email form my business.

 

The last time I hosted a similar meeting I sent out the link to the meeting and attendees joined that way. However, they were unable to see  or use Chat. 

 

Given that I cannot make 600+ people Guest members of the Team, how can I make sure they can use chat?

 

Incidentally, my settings look like this

onethreeone_0-1601976067234.png

so I suspect this is to do with attendees joining via a link and not being actual Guest Members of the Team

12 Replies

@onethreeone Hello, I assume you used the Outlook add-in and sent out the Teams meeting link to all recipients with Outlook the last meeting? I haven't tried this myself but how about doing a "bulk add" to Azure AD? As soon as the invites are accepted they are populated in Azure AD as guests and you can go ahead and schedule a meeting with those users.

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/external-identities/tutorial-bulk-invite#inv... 

 

ex. add them to a Team and schedule a channel meeting as the limit is 300 for a non-channel meeting.

@ChristianBergstrom thanks for coming back to me. No it was a rush job. Long story short: the head teacher was set to give us an update but the City Council won't allow their personnel to use anything other than Teams so I was drafted in at the last minute. All I could do was to send a link to the chair who sent out an email containing the link.

 

Attendees clicked the link to join and, even though my settings were set to allow Guests to chat most of them didn't even have the chat icon. 

 

I really don't want to be adding 600 guests to my AD. I was hoping there might be some hints out there as to how to enable chat for folk joining the meeting from a link,

@onethreeone I'm doing a edit here, wrong conversation. Sorry.

 

Another try then.

 

I understand the part of 600 guest account to your AAD. I haven't tried anonymous chat in quite a while. You said most of them? So some anon users could chat while others couldn't?

@onethreeone Hello again! Just to follow up, could you verify some settings please.

 

- It was only a problem for a few? You said some anonymous users could use the chat? Or is it possible that they are already guests in your tenant?

- How does the meeting and messaging policies look like? Are they assigned to the organizer sending out the invite?

- You created the link last time around? How did the meeting options look like and how are your assigned policies set up?

 

I'm afraid I don't have time to verify anonymous chat right know to see what's happening. But can do it later on by creating an anon account somewhere. I'll update on the outcome!

@ChristianBergstrom Sorry, I didn't mean to say "most". No, I was the only one who could access Chat. I'd added the chair to my Team as a proper Guest and he couldn't access it either. Having looked into it some more I think I may have changed the settings the afternoon before the meeting in the evening. As I understand it the settings can sometimes take several hours to percolate through. Is that right?

 

The odd thing I noticed was that some users appeared as "Guests" and some did not. 

 

Messaging policies look like this. I've only got a single Global policy as I'm a freelancer so don't use Teams within my own tenant as I'm the only user. I assume therefore that the policies are assigned to me. 

onethreeone_1-1601991424428.png

 

 

Meeting options looked like this

onethreeone_0-1601991331435.png

 

I really appreciate your help with this. Thanks again

 

best response confirmed by onethreeone (Brass Contributor)
Solution

@onethreeone Hey! I believe you've figured this out yourself as you mentioned the delay. Yes, it takes quite some time for the policies to take effect.

 

For your information I have set up your settings (the ones you've attached) and created an anon account (Gmail). Scheduled a meeting and copied the Teams link into an email and sent it to the newly created anon address (no association at all with my tenant) and this anon user could join the meeting after being let in and participate in a chat.

 

In other words, as long as the settings are OK you don't have to worry about the guest accounts in AAD.

 

Hope that helps!

@ChristianBergstrom Oh that's great news!

 

The really big meeting is tomorrow night so I'll let you know how it goes

 

Once again, thank you so much for your help

 

tack så mycket

@onethreeone No worries! (inga problem ;) While you're at it do take a look at the Global meeting policy as well (not only the messaging policy). Under "Participants & guests".

 

bec064_0-1601993230334.png

 

Good luck!

@ChristianBergstrom Yep. That's enabled too! Should be good to go!

 

Cheers!

Hi @ChristianBergstrom 

 

Sadly, it didn't work. The one guy I have in my Team said that he was seeing a message that chat was disabled for this meeting. He could open a chat window but could only see the chat he'd been involved in on a different meeting some weeks earlier. He was using a browser rather than the installed client. He could also only see himself and not the other users which leads me onto....

 

The one thing all attendees have in common is that their kids all attend the same school and so many of them are using PCs with a Teams client installed and signed in with all the protocols set up by the school (can't see other users, only the teacher). My daughter tells me that they can all participate in chat though. 

 

So at the meeting no one could access chat. And those who'd used their kid's client couldn't see anyone but could hear everything and raise their hands.

 

It sounds as though it's the school's protocols that are affecting this although that doesn't explain why my colleague had issues when viewing though the browser (unless the browser was Edge or IE and signed in with his kid's school account - that would cause the protocols from the school's client to kick in wouldn't it?)

 

I'm thinking of testing this by inviting a few folk to a trial meeting and have them only use a browser (not the desktop client) and to make sure the browser is signed out of their kid's account.

 

Does that sound sensible or do you think I'm on the wrong track? I'm very open to a better suggestion!

 

Thanks in advance I really appreciate your help so far.

 

@onethreeone Hello! Sorry to hear that it didn't work out as intended. What I would recommend is to go through all the Teams settings and policies related to guests and meetings once again and verify that the policies are indeed assigned to the individual creating the meeting invite. As you mentioned you're about to do some testing and that's certainly the right approach. It shouldn't be such a hassle to achieve this, as long as the settings are set up properly the anonymous users can participate in the chat as well, not only be part of the meeting. I did verify this a couple of days ago.

@ChristianBergstrom There's no substitute for testing! Thanks for getting back to me. I'll pick it apart and see if I can find the issue. I'm sure it's lurking in there somewhere. 

 

What's frustrating me is that everyone just wants to use Zoom and think that Teams is no good. I know that's not true but I'm losing the argument at the minute!

 

Thanks again for all your help and advice. I'll report back!

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by onethreeone (Brass Contributor)
Solution

@onethreeone Hey! I believe you've figured this out yourself as you mentioned the delay. Yes, it takes quite some time for the policies to take effect.

 

For your information I have set up your settings (the ones you've attached) and created an anon account (Gmail). Scheduled a meeting and copied the Teams link into an email and sent it to the newly created anon address (no association at all with my tenant) and this anon user could join the meeting after being let in and participate in a chat.

 

In other words, as long as the settings are OK you don't have to worry about the guest accounts in AAD.

 

Hope that helps!

View solution in original post