Businesses and organizations around the world are getting smarter and future-ready with Microsoft Solutions. Advanced collaboration, communication, and data management capabilities are highlights of Microsoft solutions. The University of Otago in New Zealand recently exploited these possibilities to enrich their student experiences and engagement systems. Your business can also make use of these possibilities if you have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription. For every organization, it is challenging to collaborate or engage with external guests. Both Microsoft SharePoint and Teams are platforms that come with outstanding external guest managing capabilities. Let us see how to manage Microsoft Teams External Guest Access and SharePoint Guest Access with good control.
Here is how you can enable a user from outside your Office 365 organization to collaborate and engage seamlessly. Guest users are valuable assets for all businesses. There could be clients, customers, vendors, and partners in this guest users list.
To confirm that sharing is enabled for the tenant.
To confirm that your Office 365 groups are allowing users to add external guest users:
To confirm that guest sharing is turned on in SharePoint Admin Center:
The above options let you configure SharePoint external sharing well.
The guest access to your Microsoft Teams platform will be turned on by default. If you want to set up a specific configuration to manage guest access, you can get it done from the Microsoft Teams admin center. To get Microsoft Teams External Guest Access right, follow these steps.
The guest access options you have set up reflect or work differently for both SharePoint and Office 365 Groups. Office 365 Groups have two permission settings. Owner and member are those two settings. The owner will have full control of the groups and will be the Site Collection Administrator of the backend SharePoint Site. Member will have the right to edit permission to the group and the backend SharePoint site.
SharePoint Permission Groups have more detailed permission characteristics compared to the Office 365 Groups. It consists of 3 permission settings: Site collection administrator, Site owner, Site members, and Site Visitors. Site collection administrators will have total control over the SharePoint site and the site collection settings. Site owners will have site owner permission, but they cannot control certain features in the site collection. Site members will have the privilege to edit site permissions and they can edit the lists too. Site visitors is the permission settings with the least permissions. They will only have read-only permissions to a site.
There are some significant differences in the way guests can be identified or engage in both SharePoint and Teams. To identify guest users, you need to check their email addresses in the SharePoint platform. When in Teams, it is a lot easier as all guests will have (Guest) affixed along with their username. In the Microsoft Teams platform, an external guest user cannot be assigned as a Team owner. Whereas in SharePoint, a guest user can be promoted as a Site owner. Keep these things in mind before you add a guest to Microsoft Teams platform.
It is when you configure both SharePoint and Teams settings ideally, things work the way you want. Hope you got a basic idea about how to manage Microsoft Teams external guest access and SharePoint guest access now. We will explain some scenarios to show you how things work on both platforms, in our next blog. Have a good day and stay tuned.