Using Teams with multiple organizations

[freddy311082]

Hi Guys

Imagine that I have 2 companies and I want to use Office 365 for Business in both. How can I use Teams with both companies without logout and login each time I need? If I have to do that, this is not viable at all.

PD: I'm using Teams on macOS

[#2]

Hi, if you're asking about shared channels (Direct connect) it's rolling out right now. You could possibly already have it enabled in your tenant.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-connect-shared-channels-...

[#3]

Thanks Christian, I am! That's fab news... will take a look

[#4]

Thanks for the update, @ChristianJBergstrom, however, this still does not solve the original problem where you need to be signed in to multiple tenancies at the same time.

[#5]

No, it does not. But make it possible to not have to be added as a guest user in another tenant for proper collaboration. Sometimes it's just fine with one channel for a specific topic/channel.

[#6]

I really don't understand why this is so hard for Microsoft to understand why someone would need to or want to log into multiple organizations at a time with each teams client.

Being a consultant, I have to log into multiple slacks, multiple ad/teams/domain environments, gsuites, and others in between to function and survive.  It's like no one at microsoft has worked with 2 customers or more at a time to live in multiple worlds with the thick client.  I can't run multiple profile/org instances, nor switch accounts in one, but absolutely need either/both, and hack around it by running different windows desktop vms, which is terrible.  I can only manage this otherwise today with different browser instances via web browsers, but this is iffy too with teams chat on web (it still seems to hate linux as a host os).

I do multiple orgs with slack before microsoft started giving teams away, and never imagined it would have *not* been a thing to do this already until customer orgs of mine started defaulting to using o365, and still microsoft doesn't get this simple use case to support this.  Consultants and others that require participating in multiple org teams chats need to connect to them all, all the time - this is what we are requesting.

The mobile app does it.  Your competitors do it.  Why is this still not a thing with the thick client of teams?

[#7]

It's comical that we're 16 months out of the original roadmap item for this, and we still have no good solutions. It doesn't help that the thick client is greedy, as is chrome. I regularly have my whole system crash trying to keep teams open in a PWA and the thick client at the same time. Brutal system - just not good. And the roadmap item is a laugh, and the old uservoice services are dead. This item, as described does not solve the problem we've all asked for in uservoice and in this and hundreds of other threads: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams&searchterms=68845

[#8]

@ChristianJBergstrom, I know you're just another user trying to help, so thank you. I also think some of the comments here bashing Teams' functionality are absurd -- functionally Teams is light years beyond Slack or any other group collaboration platform.  It is without peer in terms of what it does. Slack and Google's offerings are to Teams as a bi-plane is to an Apollo lunar mission rocket. 

However, Teams is IMPOSSIBLE to use in the very specific situation (and widely requested) where a user needs to be able to join multiple tenants at the same time. This is the only way to receive live notifications of posts and chats, which, from my perspective, is a critical component of a collaboration platform -- real-time communication. Signing into other tenants via the web interface is the only real work-around, and this does give access to as many tenants as you want all at the same time. However, there are no Taskbar notifications for chats/posts in the browser. Even if you install the Teams page as an app, there are still no Taskbar notifications. If you're looking at your screen and running it in Edge, you will get the browser notice, but if you happen to not be looking at your monitor during the few seconds that alert appears, you'll only know there was a notice if you look at the browser's Teams window (or the Windows Notification history), which again destroys the entire point of live/real-time communication. It effectively makes Teams chat no better than asynchronous email.

So, ideally, Microsoft should enable multiple simultaneous access to multiple tenants, just like Outlook allows for connecting to multiple Exchange Servers. If they can't all be live in the same window, fine. Then allow multiple copies of Teams to run at the same team, each its own Tenant, sandboxed and isolated from each other for security. That should be a simple-to-implement solution (unless Electron makes that impossible -- in which case Teams should never have been built in Electron). 

But if MS can't do any of that, then fix the limitation between Edge and Windows so that browser-installed apps can have a badge count in the Taskbar. If I could see the red circled number indicating new activity in the Taskbar, I'd be OK with the browser version as the work-around. It's still not as good as the desktop app for large meetings with lots of people on video, and doesn't have the same Settings for communication device management, but for the most part, the web experience is very close to the desktop app's, minus the notification badge in Taskbar. 

Do you know if Microsoft even understands the need and the problem? My concern from reading through this entire thread is that Microsoft and others are not even trying to understand the problem. Or maybe MS is only talking with IT admins and not users -- of course many IT admins don't care about this, because they are responsible for their solo tenant. This is a problem that affects users and contractors (or board members who serve on the boards of multiple companies) who need to join multiple tenants for unrelated clients at the same time. I appreciate offering work-arounds as better than nothing, but it would also be good to hear someone acknowledge the pain and give us some confidence that MS is trying to take that pain away.

[#9]

@Colin - Work in progress https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/d256e0f6-262e-ec11-b6e6-00224827bbc2

It’s not always necessary to be a guest user in another tenant, and then cross-tenant access settings (direct connect/shared channels) are perfect. No need to switch organizations while having access to every shared channel with posts, notifications, files, apps etc.

[#10]

@ChristianJBergstrom, that link is a good sign. It looks like I had posted a comment in there a few months ago, but had lost track of it, so THANKS! However, the text of your reply seems to again completely miss the point. You're looking at this from the point of view of an IT admin managing your tenant and figuring out how you can get access to people. That's the wrong perspective and the reason you're missing the point.

Here's the most common scenario driving the tens of thousands of requests for MS to fix this: you work with 2 (or more) completely unrelated companies. They each add you with a full user account to their tenant, because that's their standard practice for their people. Maybe one or both makes you owner of a few teams in their tenant or even sets you as an admin and expects you to create your own Teams as you need them (e.g., I need to create a new cross-functional team in Teams for each major project I run). Cross-tenant access is not an option. That would require the IT admin to do something special. If I'm a contractor, I would NEVER ask my client to trust my account from another client, nor would I ask them to add my personal email address to their Teams access grants. Those both draw negative attention and undermine my value as a contractor.

In my case, I'm an admin in Teams at multiple tenants. In all cases, they would never do this for me if my email domain differed from the tenant domain name. In one I'm a global SharePoint Owner, in another I'm just given access to create new Teams, but can't change settings for other users. 

Further, take these 2 situations that have no other solution as far as I know:

1. Integration with Outlook Calendar for sending Meeting invites with a working "Join Now" button in the Outlook calendar. Currently, it's only possible to schedule a Teams meeting from Outlook for the Tenant currently signed-in to Teams. That's terrible. I need to be able to schedule Teams meetings from Outlook across multiple tenants.

2. Teams VoIP. Telephone calling from Teams ("Calls" in the left navigation in Teams) works great to place a call by clicking on a phone number anywhere in Windows. Fantastic feature and one of dozens of examples why Teams is in a class by itself compared to limited systems like Slack and Google's meager offerings. But as with #1, this currently ONLY works with the currently single signed-in Team. In my case, I only have Teams telephone calling active in 1 tenant, which means that if that tenant is not the active tenant in Desktop Teams (because I needed to sign out and sign in to a different tenant for all the reasons we've been reviewing here), then all telephone links are effectively broken, just reporting "Sorry, we couldn't connect you." and another message, "Couldn't complete the call. With your calling license, you can only call people within your organization. Talk to your IT admin to change your license."

[#11]

@Colin - Preaching to the choir mate ;) I am a member (guest user) in multi tenants so understand your posts. Simply adding that organizations don't always have to add people as guests (B2B) for proper collaboration. I don't work for Microsoft but at least they are trying to do something about it and "second half of 2022" isn't that far away, even though it seems that this specific feature probably would rollout at the end of the year.

[#12]

I do agree with that. Teams really has no good alternatives. People will mention Slack, Zoom, Google's offerings, Atlassian Suite, etc. but each of those does just a small piece of what Teams does, and you need many of those in a messy hodgepodge to achieve what Teams does with elegant simplicity. That's like telling a Word user to just use Notepad++ (plus needing a dozen other web tools to get part of the functionality in Word). And MS is adding features and improvements to Teams at an impressive pace. If they really do provide the multi-tenant simultaneous use later this year, I'm sure I'll quickly forget this was ever a concern. However, they've pushed it off multiple times and described the problem as solved when they added support 1 tenant and 1 personal account, so I'm skeptical until I see it or at least hear reports from Insiders that this feature is working in testing.

[#13]

It seems to me Microsoft is hopelessly behind with obsolete organizational thinking and immature products. I work(!) for four different organizations and have to switch several times a day. Sometimes I even have to log out THREE times – from the same account – in order to get Temas to let go of the old organization to be able to log in to the new one.

It has been so tiresome that I automated these tasks and simply let my computer repeat the procedure until Teams had successfully logged out from the old account and then, by itself, could log in to the desired one, so I, at least, can do other things in the meantime.

(BTW, I teach programming and automation part time, and have told my students: You won't get approved if you're not coming up with better solutions than Microsoft Teams.)

[#14]

Do you have to be a guest user in these organizations? Perhaps shared channels could replace that so you can collaborate with these externals without leaving your own org?

[#15]

No, I am legally employed(!) or contracted by four organizations, with responsibility to set up meetings, upload documents, and coordinate work, in all four. (In addition to that I am also a guest in even more organizations.)

[#16]

Well, it's possible to do all that using shared channels. I'm working with loads of tenants too. It's only necessary for me to switch when I need access to an entire team in another tenant. Not perhaps applicable for your use case though and then you just have to wait until they sort it out.

"Thank you for your continued feedback and patience. Support for multiple accounts is a top priority. We are actively working on it and look forward to providing an update on timing."

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-811a-ed11-b83e-000d3a4d9c20

[#17]

Well, thanks for your suggestions which I do appreciate – but that's exactly the problem: I need full access to several teams and channels in FOUR (different) organizations – several times a day (local, regional, business and NGO, sometimes even exercise of authority, besides where I'm invited as a guest), not to mention we have been advised to no not use Microsoft Teams, because of security issues (GDPR secrecy, no servers abroad etc.) when holding certain meetings, respecting patient safety in specific jurisdictions.

[#18]

You better add your vote on the above link then. Updated 13 days ago.

[#19]

Thanks for your advice.

[#20]

To the best of my understanding it cannot be done. I have a similar issue, but logged into one of them I can be a guest in the other (as long as my logged in account is added). Sad to say but Microsoft decides how people should use their product and do not make changes easily. Office 365 has been a nightmare for me and how I have used technology in the past. I can list a whole lot of things that OneDrive, Sharepoint, Teams stinks and does not permit customization. You have to use it the way MS decided with way too many details hidden behind the scene - because MS thinks users are not intelligent people. (Been that way since the beginning days of MS-DOS more or less)

[#21]

I'd like to understand when this experience isn't going to be one that's so painful that I won't use it for customer communication. I can do this in Slack, no problems, no mess, no hassle, but take me to Teams and I want to physically light my computer on fire and throw it out the window it's such a bad experience.  

When is Microsoft actually going to make it easy to use Teams across orgs?