Sometimes you will want to collaborate with people that are not in your teams’ organization. Normally you will be doing this by email, but instead, let us look at ways to add Guests to your Teams. The Guest will have fewer permissions but can still do a lot of the same things that your other team members can.
Note: You can only add guests from your desktop or the Teams web application.
Guest capabilities
Let us start by looking at what guests can do in your Teams. They can:
- Create a Channel
- Participate in a private chat
- Participate in Channel conversations
- Share a channel file
- Can edit or delete their own posted messages
- Can be invited by any work or school Microsoft 365 account
As you can see, there are lots of capabilities for the user, and they will be able to do everything they need to be able to collaborate and be successful.
Note: This is based on default settings, depending on your organization's preferences, these options may be disabled by your administrator.
Adding a guest to your team
Adding a guest to your Teams is a simple process, once you have confirmed a few prerequisites:
- Check with your Administrator if your organization allows guests.
- Does the guest you want to invite have a Microsoft 365 school or work account? (If they do not, they will be directed to create one for free)
To add guests, start by going to your teams' group, and then finding the team you want to add the guest to.
You then either right-click, or select more options on the team that you want to add to.
Select Add a Member.
You will get a pop up asking you to supply the guests email address.
Note: if you receive a “We did not find any matches” error, your organization does not allow guests.
After you have added them, this will be the time to edit the guest information. If you do not do it now, you will need the help of your Administrator to change it in the future.
Once you have chosen a name for your guest, click on the check mark, and you are done!
Now that you'll be doing even more of your collaboration in Teams, remember to brush up on how to manage the noise in Microsoft Teams.