Microsoft Teams Gets Guest Access Feature for Office 365 Commercial, Education Users

Microsoft on Monday announced that it is introducing the heavily-requested guest access feature to its Teams messaging platform. The Redmond-based company said that it is now rolling out the new feature to all Office 365 commercial and education customers. This means that Office 365 users can now add people from outside their own company to a team.

"Now Office 365 users can add people from outside their company to a team, so guests can participate in chats, join meetings, collaborate on documents, and more," Microsoft said in its blog post. Starting Monday, anyone with an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account can be added as a guest in Teams. This effectively means that users from Microsoft commercial cloud services and third-party Azure AD integrated apps can be added as a guest.

"Later, we'll add the ability for anyone with a Microsoft Account (MSA) to be added as a guest in Teams. If the guest doesn't have an existing MSA, they will be directed to create a free account using their current corporate or consumer email address, such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com," the company said in its post.

Microsoft says that the new feature comes with enterprise-grade security as the guest accounts are added and securely managed within Azure AD through Azure AD B2B Collaboration. "Azure AD also uses adaptive machine learning algorithms and heuristics to detect anomalies and suspicious incidents, enabling mitigation or remediation actions, such as multi-factor authentication, to be triggered as appropriate," the company said.

Apart from this, the new guest feature comes with the ability for IT to centrally manage how guests participate within their Office 365 environment, providing consistency across application experiences in Office 365, Microsoft said in its post. Notably, the IT admins can easily view, add, or revoke a guest's access to the host tenant, as per the company's post.

Separately, Microsoft has also introduced a new app for Mac as the company has launched a toolbar for Office 365. The new toolbar, called My Workspace, essentially gives users quick and convenient access to their Office 365 apps and features.