print friendly version

How to...

Including External colleagues/Guests in Teams

Including External colleagues with your Teams

When using Teams it is possible to include external colleagues either for just a meeting or they can be added as a member of the Team and they will show as a Guest member. If they are a Team Guest they can see the content of the Team Channels. 

To Invite External colleagues to a meeting

  1. Go to Calendar
  2. Click on New Meeting
  3. In the recipient area type the full email address Please ensure this is the actual email address and not an alias. When you see the address repeated underneath click on it to select. Make sure you see the email address appear in the recipients with the circle in front of it.
  4. Continue to add as many other recipients, both internal and external
  5. Complete the rest of the meeting information
  6. Send the invitation
  7. The external person will receive the invite and can join using Microsoft Teams.  People who don’t have a Teams account can still join in browser if they use Chrome or Edge

It’s worth mentioning that if you use Outlook you can use the New Teams Meeting button in the Calendar area. This is added to Outlook when you install the Teams desktop application on the PC. You can now add anyone from your contacts, type an external email address or use a university email alias as you might have done when booking a meeting on site.

If you use the Office 365 Calendar then when booking a meeting click the Teams slider to convert to a Teams meeting.
Outlook 365 Teams slider option

 

To add an external colleague to the Team.

  1. A Team owner can add  an external person to your Team. 
  2. Click the three dots to the right of the Team name,
  3. click on Add member
  4. Enter the full email address.
    Add External to a Team
  5. And OK. 
  6. They will then be sent an invite to join the Team.
  7. This person is now a member of the Team and can see the content of the Channels, associated files and can join meetings and chat.

 

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/guest-experience for more information on what access looks like for a guest and differences between Team Member and Team Guest users.

 If you are experiencing problems joining as a guest please see Resolving issues when joining as a guest http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/faq2933

 

created on 2020-05-07 by Sam Elmer
last updated on 2021-03-17 by Sam Elmer