The number of daily active users broke 75 million on the 29th of April, 6 weeks after 44 million on the 18th of March a week after Microsoft announced breaking 32 million users. Almost quadrupling what was announced in November 2019 .
With the shift to Working From Home during COVID-19, the increase in Teams usage has sky-rocketed in the past couple of months.
Along with this come the requests in enabling and configuring Teams for everyone internally and externally, as well as incidents advising services are not enabled.
Whether you are signing up for a Teams Free or Trial subscription or a Teams/Global Administrator of a business, here are some steps to ensure you and your team are ready to go.
Licensing
For Teams Free or Personal usage check out this page to get started.
For those interested in a 6-month trial of Office 365 Enterprise E1 which includes Teams see here.
If you are already using Office 365 you will find Teams included in these plans
and of course, Teams is included in M365 Business Premium, Enterprise E3/E5, and Education A3/A5.
To enjoy all of the features in Teams ensure that other services in the licensing plan are enabled as well. E.g. Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, etc.
Provisioning
From August 2019 new tenancies will be onboarded to Microsoft Teams and not have access to Skype for Business Online (which has End of Life slated for 31st of July 2021)
An important step here is to sign in to your 365 Admin Portal ad expand Settings.
Click Settings and under Services select Microsoft Teams.
Please ensure that “Turn-on Microsoft Teams for all users” is checked. If you have multiple Subscriptions, they will be listed here – make sure to check the boxes for all relevant plans.
For example, in Education plans make sure both Faculty and Student plans are checked here!
Teams teams
You can create and manage Teams directly from the Teams App
Or from the Teams Admin Center under Teams and Manage Teams
Stay tuned for another post where I go through the multiple different team types and methods to create them.
In the meantime feel free to review my post on restricting the creation of Teams and Office Microsoft 365 Groups.
The following steps will be performed in the Teams Admin Center, under Org-wide settings
External 1:1 Chat
To start a chat with someone outside of your organization you need to enable External Access. Keeping in mind some tenancies may still be using Skype For Business Online.
Once this is enabled, you can start an external 1 to 1 chat with other Teams users with a limited set of features in Teams chat.
External chats between Teams and SfBO users will not have these features.
We are assuming that the External party using SfBO/Teams also has External access enabled in their tenancy as well 🙂
Exercise some caution with the domain section, by default it allows all domains.
If you add in allowed domains it will only allow those and block all others.
If you add in blocked domains it will only block those and allow all other domains.
Guest Users in Teams
Here is where things start to get interesting. You want to invite an external user into a Teams team, but when you enter their email address you get a message advising user not found
Chances are Guest access has not been enabled and once it is the following settings appear:
Once enabled you will need to allow it some time to propagate these permissions.
Inviting a Guest User to a Team will also create a Guest User in Azure Active Directory and it will only have permissions to the Teams team assigned to the associated Microsoft 365 Group it is a member of.
Be aware that Guest user will have access to previous posts and documents in the Files tab (and any other Tabs added to channels), so this may not be what you are looking for.
Teams Meetings
We have come to the most used feature now – the Teams Meeting – but with external users!
First off check your Meeting settings under Meetings in the Teams Admin Center is set to allow Anonymous users to join a meeting.
This allows anyone with the unique invitation link to enter your meeting, and they do not necessarily require an O365 account or licensing. (Similar to a Teams Live Event, download 5 Steps to a successful Live Event in Teams in PDF format)
Otherwise, they will enter the lobby to your meeting, if you have Meeting policies set to automatically admin everyone or just participants in your organization.
You can invite guests to the meeting from the meeting itself if it has started. Just click on the Participants button (placed precariously next to the hangup button)
Then you can enter email addresses (or phone numbers if you have Microsoft 365 Audio Conferencing licenses) or click on the Copy join info button to the right
Note that the participants will have (Guest) next to their name in the People list, this does not make them Guest Users in Azure AD unless they already were.
Bonus tip:
While you can have External 1:1 Teams Chats you cannot initiate an External Group Chat, however, from a Teams Meeting a Group Chat is created which can contain External Users. Here’s an excerpt from the Sydney Microsoft 365 Modern Management Meetup Group:
This Group Chat hangs around after the meeting has ended, so it could be re-used again for later meetings or discussions if desired.
Otherwise, you can leave the Chat and Hide the Conversation History.
While this just scrapes the surface of Teams configuration, these 6 steps will ensure that you have your users smoothly Working From Home (and beyond) and collaborating with all parties.
M365 Senpai 