Teams quick tip: start a chat as a guest

Microsoft Teams

Recently in conversation with fellow MVP Steven Collier, we had differing views on how chats can be initiated by guests based on our experiences. As it wasn’t clearly documented I sought clarification from the Teams team.

When a guest joins a team, they become a member of the Azure Active Directory and gain visibility of the directory to a certain extent.

How this plays out is that a guest can initiate a chat with any another person in the tenant, in a couple of different scenarios:

Name-based discovery only works for people who exist in the same teams as you

What this means is that if I am in a team with John Doe, I can start a chat with John simply by typing his name.

Similarly if another guest called Jane Smith (Guest) is in the team with me, I can also initiate a chat with Jane by typing her name.

However, if Damien Margaritis is not in a team with me – I cannot initiate a chat with him by typing his name:

Which leads us to….

Chatting with people outside of your teams

Similar to how federation works in Skype for Business; you can initiate a chat with someone in the tenant if you know their email address.

So in the previous example where I was not able to find Damien Margaritis by name, I can however find him by his email address of damien@morsmutual.com.

And now you know!

Should end users be able to create Office 365 Groups?

Office 365

Last week while attending the MVP Summit at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, a group of us were given the opportunity to film a debate in the Microsoft Production Studios – where they create all their official broadcast-grade content.

The topic was around whether end users should be able to create Office 365 Groups, or whether this should be controlled by IT. The creation of Groups extends to and impacts a whole number of Office 365 apps and services, and can be a crucial component in the success of Office 365 in any organisation.

The whole debate is 30 minutes long, with some fantastic points raised by some very smart people for both sides of the argument. Check it out!