Apr 21 2022 11:55 PM - edited Apr 21 2022 11:56 PM
We find that Teams Chat to External users of another tenancy Teams (using their full email name) notifies them within their Teams that there is an incoming message and allows them to participate in a text-only conversation. The recipient is logged into their 'home' Teams and doesn't need to do anything else, or switch to the senders Tenancy.
If a Teams Chat is sent to a Guest user, who is logged into their 'home' Teams (and not the senders Teams tenancy) they get no notification.
This is not the expected behaviour. Adding someone to a Channel automatically creates a Guest, and we are having to tell our users to ignore the suggested Guest account when trying to start a Chat and instead type in the full email name to send the message to an External account if they want their message to be seen immediately.
Apr 22 2022 01:51 AM
@PhillipHamlyn Unfortunately, this is how it works at the moment. If you want to have a private chat with an external user, you must use their full address (External).
Apr 22 2022 01:56 AM
Apr 22 2022 03:23 AM
Apr 22 2022 03:39 AM
Apr 22 2022 03:49 AM
@PhillipHamlyn Agreed this isn't a great experience at the moment.
Have you looked at Shared Channels yet? It's just entered Public Preview and goes some of the way to removing this issue. Shared Channels replace guest access with direct access, when you share a channel with an external party they see that channel in their regular Teams environment, and don't need to tenant switch to access it. They don't get a second chat experience, everything stays in their tenant.
Think of Shared Channels as the nearest equivalent to federated chat, everyone stays in their own tenant but is allowed to use channels or the existing chat.
Apr 22 2022 03:57 AM
Apr 22 2022 04:14 AM
@PhillipHamlyn You only need to know the email once, as it's then going to be in your chat list. Typically you start from an email anyway, and reply with IM or use the Teams menu to start a chat. Or if they are part of a shared channel with you then you can start a chat from there.
I'm not really with you about listing external people in a GAL, it's rarely kept accurate. Is that really how your users work with Outlook, every external person they talk to has been added to the GAL so they can 'find them' ?
Apr 22 2022 04:43 AM
Apr 22 2022 05:11 AM
Apr 22 2022 06:36 AM
Apr 22 2022 06:41 AM
May 11 2023 01:48 PM
With the recent Cross tenant Sync features I have enabled syncing of users across two tenants. Users from Company A are created as guests on Company B, and Users from Company B are created on Company A as guests. Due to this notification matter and having two different chat entities customers doesn't like it. Example.
When you search for a user from Company B as a user on Company A, the guest account for the user comes up, if a user pick that it goes to the guest account of the company B user, instead of sending it to his actual teams account.
Has anyone found a workaround or any update at all from MS on this ?
Jul 11 2023 01:53 PM
@PhillipHamlyn we are experiencing the same issue at scale (multi-national conglomerate of Azure B2B Cross Tenant Sync collaboration). Microsoft needs to resolve this issue or provide us with a way to "hide" the Guest/Member accounts and only show "External" options for Teams chat.
Jul 12 2023 11:32 PM