Organization: has a few Teams-licenses; non-licensed user guest access problematic?

Copper Contributor

We've noticed today an issue with an invitation from an external company for guest access to their Teams site. Within our organization, only a subset of the users are now using O365; while everyone has Exchange Online mailboxes. Now one of the people who doesn't have an O365-license (and so no Teams license within our organization) has received an invitation to join an external Teams as guest. But we keep getting in a loop where our company admin (yours truly) needs to enable Teams for this user? How, without license? After all, he's only a guest now in another Teams environment?

4 Replies

@jbostoenDue to your organisation having Office 365 you need to license the user for Teams for them to be able to accept an invitation sent to their work email address. I haven't found a way around this previously. 

@Andrew Hodges  I'm afraid so. We're planning to roll out O365 in about a year to the entire organization, but not now.

Really doesn't seem to make sense you can allow access to people with no O365 at all; but they can't belong to an organization which partially has O365 licenses...

Another (ridiculous) work around I've heard is to use private accounts which really is questionable in all other ways.

@jbostoen  The only other possible suggestion would be to give them a temp, "in cloud account" so email would be jbostoen@domain.onmicrosoft.com. That is a bit of a phaff but as they are an external user in the other tenant the account could just be deleted nearer the time of rollout. 

 

The other workaround you mention is a possibility but not exactly an "Enterprise" solution.

@jbostoenThinking about this a bit more. I think you dont need to license them for Teams, they just need to exist as a user in your Tenant, you may not need to license them at all, but not something I have ever tried. They would have to login to the web version of teams in the other company in this scenario. To access an external network that you are a guest of in the desktop client you have to be licensed in your tenant to login.