Microsoft Teams Administration Cookbook

Chapter 11. Collaborating with External Users

Teams enables collaboration with users inside and outside your organization. Collaboration with external users—leveraging a common set of features, as well as chats and documents—minimizes the effort required to work with customers and partners who aren’t part of your Microsoft 365 tenant. There are three types of external access in Teams:

• Guest access

• External access

• Shared channels

The three access modalities are technically different and each has a unique impact on the user experience, compliance, and security of the platform.

Another way to communicate with external users while in Teams is with Azure Communication Services (ACS). ACS is a set of cloud-based services with REST APIs and client library SDKs that integrate communication (voice and video calling, rich text chat, SMS, and email) with your custom applications.

11.1 Activating External Identities

Problem

You need to enable and secure External Identities.

Solution

The default settings in Entra ID are not restrictive, allowing you to facilitate the external collaboration. However, in many scenarios it is advisable to limit who can invite guest users and bar some domains from the collaboration.

In the recipe, you will:

• Verify that your Entra ID tenant is linked to a subscription.

• Check the cross-tenant access settings.

• Restrict some of the default settings for external collaboration.

• Delegate guest invites to the tenant to the desired user.

First, open the Microsoft ...