Teams guest inviter role

[eynarain]

As a Teams admin, I'd like to allow my team owners to invite external guests to their teams provided they are authorized. I learned that Teams doesn't support guest inviter role yet. Is there any mechanism one can authorize team owners selectively to invite their guests rather than opening the floodgates to all team members?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @eynarain,

Hmm, AFAIK there isn't any easy way to do this in the Teams Admin Centre or within the Teams client. However, saying this you could test the following

1.) Private Teams should mean that only owners can add guests. I have just tested this with a colleague and a user in my private group could not invite a guest. I believe members can invite guests in Public Groups.

2.) Follow this to lock down specific Teams from inviting guests so even owners will not be permitted https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Allow-or-Block-Guest-Users-from-a-Specific-Te.... I believe this can also be achieved by re-configuring the Office 365 group permissions linked to the Team and switching off the Let Group Owners add people outside the organisation to groups.

Therefore you will have Teams where a.) Owners and guests and invite b.) Owners can invite and c.) No one can invite.

Please let me know how you get on. To note, the big issue here will be the visibility of all this and managing it going forward - so I would log these changes when they are done to keep track.

Hope that answers your question

Best, Chris

[#3]

I guess private teams is the way to go, but that also means internal users as well! Not that bad cause now there’s going an approval to the owners of the team! This process should work the same with guests afaik!
There’s also coming settings to allow guests in certain channels only, probably in conjunction with private channels

[#4]

@Christopher HoardThanks. That helps a bit, but the only problem is management nightmare. We're anticipating around 20K additional users on-boarding the Teams platform in the next few months and this approach doesn't scale. I heard of another solution through guest inviter role, but unfortunately Teams doesn't support this. Is there any roadmap for the same?

[#5]

Sure, guest inviter role is mentioned in this article here and stated it is not currently supported

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-dependencies

So that leaves the above. There is several uservoices open for centralised guest management including this

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/33554020-provide-central-manag...

So I would vote on it to push it up the agenda. This is an aspect of Teams which needs to be refined.

Hope that clarifies

Best, Chris

[#6]

@eynarain What currently is "not supported" is someone with the Guest Inviter role using Microsoft Teams to invite the guests. It errors out and Microsoft calls this a "UI Feature Gap."

However, that very same user can go to Outlook on the web and invite the same guest to the Office 365 Group associated with the Microsoft Teams team. Thus, the invited guest user can then participate in MS Teams channel conversations.

This flow is a little counter-intuitive, but does work. Shouldn't be too hard to communicate to those users in the Guest Inviter role (presumably there aren't too many of them, otherwise you'd turn on allowing Guest Invitations for all users).