Microsoft Teams via Guest accounts

Campus licensing for Office365 limits full access to MS Teams to payroll employees. Partners and other non-employees can be added with limited Guest access. This article provides some tips to use Teams effectively if you are a using a Guest account.

Guest experience in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft documentation on the differences between full accounts and guest accounts.

How to use Teams Chat as a Guest

Guests cannot search the address book in the top search bar in Teams to find and start a chat with a University employee. Guests can chat with anyone in their assigned Teams. This provides a workaround for the limitation of searching via the search bar. 

To start a chat with people in your team:

  1. Select your team
  2. To the right of the team name are three dots for more options, click that and select Manage Team
  3. Open the list of Members and Guests and select the person you want to chat with.
  4. From the info panel that opens, click the chat bubble icon below their image/image placeholder to start the chat.

screenshots of steps 1 and 2 described above

 Screenshot of steps 3 and 4 above

After you’ve chatted with someone, whether you started it or they did, you’ll be able to go directly to your chat history in Teams and start chatting with them again from there instead of going through all these steps.

Additional information

Extension KB: Microsoft Teams in Extension

Microsoft documentation: Add guests to a team in Teams



Keywords:
MS Office 365 teams guest chat POI 
Doc ID:
115526
Owned by:
Kevin G. in Extension Handbook
Created:
2022-01-06
Updated:
2024-07-01
Sites:
Extension Handbook