guest users

Many Office 365 applications (Teams, Groups, Planner, SharePoint, etc.) now support external guest access. you might end up with a lot of guests, and like any good accommodation, some management is needed. In this article, we look at how to manage the guests created by Office 365.

Office 365 Groups and Teams support guest users, who enjoy full access to the SharePoint document libraries. You might not want this, because not every document in those libraries are suitable for sharing with guests. The question is how to collaborate with guests while maintaining some control over information. Rights management seems like a good way to accomplish the task.

A new premium Azure Active Directory feature allows you to force group owners to certify that external members should have continued access. Given that Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams now both support guest users, it is wise to check on who can access what from time to time. Whether you will want to pay extra for such a feature is quite another matter!

Now that Microsoft has shipped external access for Teams, it is obvious that they have some work to do to smoothen access and increase functionality. Although access works as long as guest users have accounts in other Office 365 tenants, areas like switching, auditing what external users do, compliance, and blocking deserve some consideration. Here's what we know from the last week.

Microsoft launched the long-awaited external access for Teams on Sept 11. The downside is that only Azure AD accounts are supported, but the functionality is sufficient to support interaction between Office 365 tenants. You can access a team in my tenant and I can access a team in yours. What's not to like about that?

The news that Teams won't support external access when they planned is not a shock. But what is needed is a common external access mechanism that can work for all of the Office 365 applications. Let's not reinvent the wheel!

Ignite is two weeks gone, but there’s still lots of work to reveal all the sessions that I missed. The OneDrive roadmap was one such session, and it included some interesting figures for OneDrive usage. The Grand Exchange on-premises or cloud debate is also online and I also listened to how the dedicated team at Microsoft has lovingly assembled a profanity list for you to use. Finally, some reflections on transforming distribution groups to Office 365 Groups and what this means for mail contacts.