Microsoft Teams: Guest Users and Access (ETS Internal) (Admins Only)

Guest access lets you add individual users from outside your organization to your teams and channels in Microsoft Teams.

Who is a guest?

A guest is someone who isn't an employee, student, or member of your organization. They don't have a school or work account with your organization. For example, guests may include partners, vendors, suppliers, or consultants. Anyone who is not part of your organization can be added as guest in Teams. This means that anyone with a business account (that is, an Azure Active Directory account) or consumer email account (with Outlook.com, Gmail.com or others) can participate as a guest in Teams, with full access to teams and channel experiences.

To learn more about what a guest can and can't do, read Authorize guest access in Microsoft Teams. Or check out the comparison of team member and guest capabilities table.

Finally, all guests in Teams are covered by the same compliance and auditing protection as the rest of Office 365, and can be managed securely within Azure AD.

Why use guest access?

With guest access, organizations that use Teams can provide access to teams, documents in channels, resources, chats, and applications to their partners, while maintaining complete control over their own corporate data. All guests in Teams are covered by the same compliance and auditing protection as the rest of Office 365, and guests can be managed securely within Azure AD.

Understand the limitations for guests

The guest experience has limitations by design. Make sure you understand the guest experience so you don't try to fix something that isn't a problem. For example, here's a list of some of the functionality that isn't available to a guest in Microsoft Teams:

  • OneDrive for Business
  • People search outside of Teams
  • Calendar, Scheduled Meetings, or Meeting Details
  • PSTN
  • Organization chart
  • Create or revise a team
  • Browse for a team
  • Upload files to a person-to-person chat
  • Currently, Teams supports only State 1 and State 2 types of guest users as defined by Azure B2B

For a full list of what a guest can and can't do in Teams, see the comparison of team member and guest capabilities table. To learn more about guest access at the Office 365 level, read Adding guests to Office 365 Groups.

More information

Contact support for business products - Admin Help
Guest access in Office 365 Groups

Print Article