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]

This is a step in the right direction however, just like in Discord, my dream is that Microsoft Teams one day shows all the Teams I have joined to in a single window, regardless of what tenancy/organisation I am joined from. For example, if I am a Member/Owner in 2 Teams from Company AAA, and 3 Teams from Company BBB, then Microsoft Teams should show all 5 in a single window, in the left hand navigation pane. I don't know how to express this request any further.

[#3]

@MichaelDelpach Which is how Shared Channel access works today if a company uses that model instead of guest access. Sure there are complexities, with it and improvements coming, but it allows two tenants to access the same Teams.

The reason that quite a few orgs don't adopt it is that they don't like the security implications that this model brings, and prefer having two separate identities which is the tenant/identity shifting that improves significantly with the new client.

There's no shortage of options. Discord wouldn't meet many companies security requirements by the same measure.

[#4]

This is why people use Slack over Teams. Microsoft tried to copy Slack, but still comes up short.

[#5]

I didn't ask to copy Discord security, just the UI implementation. What's so difficult or bad about simply displaying all the Teams you as a person joined in a single window without having to switch?

[#6]

@MikeButash, Slack does a few simple things better than Teams, much like bicycle is better in certain very specific ways than an airplane. Teams as vastly more feature rich and capable than Slack, but if you happen to need the specific function of Slack, sure in those niche cases, it will be the better solution.

[#7]

@Steven Collier, I love Teams. It has made life much, much easier overall. However, comments like yours about shared and guest access are purely from the IT admin's perspective. They miss the problem facing the independent contractor who has to work for multiple clients, each with its own unrelated security model. If I work with 5 companies, each using Teams and each providing me a separate account on their tenant, I need the Teams client on my various PC's to support 5 separate tenant logins and be able to receive real-time notices/alerts, including badges in the Taskbar, from all of them at the same time. I can't tell my client to provide special IT work to support me by creating a Guest account or authorizing another company's accounts (possibly a competitor's). I need to adhere to each client's existing security model, which typically means using a different account provided by each tenant.

Outlook added this capability in the ~2010 version (give or take a version). The ability to have connections to multiple tenants all active at the same time is essential.

The new Teams client may support this, but I can't personally use it yet, because it lacks support for third-party apps. I need those for receiving SMS/text messages in Teams. As soon as that is available in the new Teams, I'll jump over.

[#8]

@Colin - Thank you for stating the need so clearly!  I fear that most of the people involved are truly "geeks", who look at this from a programming/security side, are Microsoft employees who don't experience the world of contracting, and just don't see how much of a priority it should be to make Teams more like it's competitors like Zoom, where it is not for an internal team only.

[#9]

EXACTLY!!

[#10]

@Colin - Well, yes, that is what the new client does and when it's finished later this year it will of course support all the custom app features that the current client supports.

Also to be clear, no one on this thread works for Microsoft, we are community volunteers who work with Teams. 

[#11]

@freddy311082 

So, over 3 years since the original question and still no proper support for multiple organisations?!

Taking a look at the roadmap there are various features in the pipeline for decorating your background or a new "fun picker" to access all your emojis in one place but as a Mac user, I can't work properly with more than one organisation at a time. Absolutely shocking from Microsoft. 

[#12]

@YellowCat New Preview version of teams have support to login with multiple organizations
Please refer to this article :  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/introducing-the-new-microsoft-teams-now-...

[#13]

Thanks for that but this relates to the Windows version. As stated in my post, I use Teams on a Mac like many other design-related contractors. It seems crazy that this issue has existed for years now and I'm still having to log in to multiple accounts using a workaround and, as a result, am missing notifications from clients. Does anyone know when Mac users can expect the new preview version?

I'm an admin for my organisation and I have enabled the Preview for all users but it's not showing up on the Mac desktop version.

[#14]

@YellowCat Microsoft hasn’t fixed the issue if the new version still cannot see all the Teams the user has joined across multiple organisations. 

[#15]

If Mike is employed by Org1 and Aaron is with Org2, it is likely that in the new Teams 2.0, Mike (as a Guest in Org2's Teams) can still converse with Aaron, while Aaron (as a Guest in Org1's Teams) can communicate with Mike. This setup would essentially allow for two completely separate one-to-one conversations to occur.

[#16]

I can already communicate with multiple Orgs as a guest using my own account. However, a guest doesn't get full functionality such as uploading files in chat making the guest experience fairly useless for collaborating (see screenshots). I can workaround this by uploading files separately and then sharing it that way but it's not exactly convenient to share multiple files every day.

To get around the guest limitations most clients set me up as part of their Org which is where the multiple Org problems start. I'm currently registered in 4 different Orgs (4 different domains) and I want to get notifications from them all in one place. This is currently impossible and is the problem many other contractors face.

At the moment my largest client is logged into my Teams desktop app and others have to be accessed via the web app. I rely on the mobile app to get notifications. It's basically a mess!

[#17]

The latest Teams 2.0, I tested yesterday and unfortunately you still have to switch between organisations. In other words, I work for Company C1, and I have a Guest account (same email address though) in Company C2. In my Teams 2.0, I still have to switch between C1 and C2 on Teams, to see the list of Teams. In C1, I am joined in 3 Teams, and in C2 I am joined in 2 Teams. I just cannot see all 5 Teams together in one window. Is that a hard ask?

When a user click on the Teams button on the left, the UI should be like this:

C1
> Team 1
> Team 2
> Team 3
C2
> Team 1
> Team 2

There you go, no more account switching, and all the teams you joined as a human, are there. I don't know how more simply I have to explain this to Microsoft. We have been asking this for years.