The Office and Teams product groups have done it, and they’ve launched External Guest Access for Microsoft Teams.

Here is the blog entry: https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/09/11/expand-your-collaboration-with-guest-access-in-microsoft-teams/

This is the feature that we’ve been waiting for to start talking about MS Teams in an enterprise way.

This capability is also the next step to having MS Teams support external user chat, both 1:1 and small group.

While External Guest Access is announced in todays blog, I’m still waiting for it to show up in my tenants. Today, or tomorrow, or soon, we will have it, and then we’ll be able to judge how soon we can roll it out to our users – there is some chatter in the video accompanying this blog about some aspects of the capability being launched now and some others, such as full federated support for commercial email systems, still coming later. Until that time, invited users will receive a unique code and will type that in to authenticate, instead of using their own email password.

If this feature is done right, it will enable us to have 1:1 and group chats with external users, regardless of their O365 license situation. I hope this will be easier to use, and will remove the requirement to have as many chat clients on the phone as we have today (in the long run).

Another good piece in this blog is the image of the current Office 365 adoption numbers.

Question: is this the slide that will be used at MS Ignite in a couple of weeks, or is this already outdated and going to be updated? I guess we’ll have to attend or watch MS Ignite to find out!

Categories: Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Teams