Microsoft Teams

Office 365 now supports external access to Teams for guests with any email address, a development that creates some questions in the minds of those who might want to add guests from non-Office 365 domains. In this article, I try and answer some common questions that you might have about guest access.

Microsoft might be working on a free version of Teams to take on Slack. As it turns out, not many technical changes are needed to transform the full enterprise version of Teams as available inside Office 365 into a limited version that Microsoft can make available for free, leveraging its existing consumer office services like Outlook and OneDrive.

Six months after allowing users from other Office 365 domains to access Teams as guest users, Microsoft now supports access from any email address. You can now invite people to join teams from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Yandex, Outlook.com, or any other email system. The same basic Azure B2B collaboration flow is used to invite guests and redeem the invitations, so it should be a well-worn path for administrators at this stage.

Microsoft is preparing to offer a free SKU of Teams with the long-term goal of hoping that these users will upgrade to Office 365 to unlock all the features.

Now that so many apps (like Teams) create Office 365 Groups, it’s logical that some of the groups will serve their purpose and then need to be archived. Office 365 offers no way to do this, but conceptually it’s a reasonably easy task and something that PowerShell handles with aplomb.

Teams is the poster child for Office 365 right now, so it’s only right that Microsoft has refreshed the Teams UI a year into the app’s life. The changes look pretty good and are useful, even if the Who Bot might not be able to unpick the complexities of the organization you work for.

Office 365 Groups (and Teams) can quickly become obsolete, but administrators need some help to find the underused groups. PowerShell comes to the rescue through a mixture of checks against the group mailbox, Office 365 audit log, and Teams compliance records. A nice HTML report is the result – and isn’t that always welcome.

The Teams PowerShell module is flawed, but that does not mean that you cannot do work with it. Here’s a primer of the most important cmdlets, together with a link to a rather interesting approach to finding out what Office 365 Groups are team-enabled.

A new Microsoft support article clarifies premium features used by Office 365 Groups that require premium licenses. While good to know when you have to pay extra, it is baffling why some of the features fall into the premium category and why so many licenses are needed. The solution is to buy the Enterprise Mobility and Security suite. Or just pay for the extra licenses.

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.