Ways To Collaborate Seamlessly Outside Your Organization With Microsoft Teams

In the modern workplace, effective collaboration with external partners is essential. External collaboration could range from adhoc chats with a vendor to more structured or long-term collaboration with suppliers or business partners.

Microsoft 365 provides multiple options when collaborating with external organizations in Microsoft Teams.

Teams Connect shared channels. This new feature enables Teams users, including external participants from other Azure AD organizations, to collaborate in a shared workspace. Shared channels users can leverage the collaborative capabilities Teams offers with people internal and external to their organization. To help reduce oversharing of information, members of shared channels can only access resources within that shared channel and do not have access to the parent team. Any external shared channel users are a member of will show up alongside the rest of their teams and channels in their own organizations. Users don’t have to tenant switch to collaborate externally.
Users can have conversations, schedule a meeting, share and co-author files, and collaborate on apps without ever switching organizations in their Teams client. External users are easily identifiable with a label (External) next to their name.

Eternal access in Teams. This feature allows Teams users to communicate with people from other organizations. External access in Teams enables users to see availability, find, call, chat, and set up meetings with external organizations who also permit external access in Teams.
When communicating through external access with external members, users see notifications and chats inside their Teams client. This means that users do not need to manage switching organizations when communicating through external access in Teams. Users can easily recognize if someone has external access if (External) is displayed after the name. Chats, chat list, and notifications also contain an external tag.

External access is managed through the Teams admin center and PowerShell where PowerShell is used for user-level policies. IT has multiple options to manage external access depending on the type of federation being established, including the option to disable communications with external Teams users who are not using an organizational account.

Guest access in Teams. This feature enables collaboration with users external to the organization by adding them as guests to your organization’s Azure Active Directory. Guest access enables external users to have broad access to organization data and applications beyond Teams channels. External users will have to switch tenants to collaborate in Teams in other organizations. Bringing a guest into Teams allows them to have access to private channels they’re invited to and all standard channels in the team.
An important distinction with guest access in Teams is that external users need to switch organizations in their Teams client to collaborate in the guest organization. Guests are easily identifiable with a label (Guest) next to their name.

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