Working in teams with external users

[Øystein Kleppestrand]

We have a 'sister organisation' abroad. I find users marked with External, and chat with them no problem.

Adding them to a team however is not supported. So whenever I add a user to a team the user needs to respond to a Teams generated invitation which creates a guest user account in our Azure AD.

Challenge is, the external user needs to switch account to my org's guest account to interact with the team. When he is logged on as the guest account he can not at the same time interact with his internal users who are not logged in to guest account. Nor will he be notified about messages in other organisation. 

The only workaround I'm aware of is to be logged in to web client with one user and on the windows client with the other user.  

Is there a way to set a 'trust relationship' between our organisations so that we don't have to use separate guest accounts for external users who needs to access our teams? 

Or other ways to solve this? 
 

[#2]

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[#3 · Accepted solution]

Yes, as long as you don't have to add them as guest users with full resource permissions to a team for example you can have a look at the coming (like now) Direct Connect feature, also known as Teams Connect, shared channels. It lets you share a channel with your trusted (federation 2.0) partner/s instead of the entire team.

It's already in place in Azure AD portal under Cross-tenant access settings where you establish a trust between the orgs. This has to be done both ways. And will be added to Teams any day now in Public Preview.

The shared channels will appear in your Teams team list in your client so no need for tenant switching.

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