In the beginning, Microsoft Teams had a limited scope: a team was always private and limited to colleagues within the same organization. Now, your team can also include people outside your organization. And all team mates, including the external guests, can easily see who else is on the team.
I’ve discussed in a previous blog post on what’s with Teams: what does this chat-based collaboration app in Office 365 offer us and why we use it. It is a hub for teamwork. Now let us look closer who can be part of such a Team.
Inviting team mates
Colleagues as team members
A Team Owner can add new members from inside the organization via the famous ellipsis (dot dot dot…), selecting Add Members. You can only do this at the level of the Team, not at the level of a Channel: the permissions apply to the Team as a whole.
The Team Owner can add Members to the Team via the ellipsis.
Once you have added a colleague as a Member, you can upgrade them to become a co-Owner.
The Team Owner can upgrade Members to the Owner role.
Externals als team guests
The Team Owner can also invite guests from outside the organization. At the moment, you can only invite people who have a Azure Active Directory account, such as everyone who uses Office 365. Later on, you should be able to invite anyone with a Microsoft account, like in SharePoint Team Sites.
The Team Owners can invite guests via their email addresses
Note that when you participate in Teams in more than one organization and more than one tenant, you have to switch between them in the app.
Megan works for Contoso and has some Teams there. She can switch to the Teams at Macaw where she is a Guest.
Joining a public Team?
When you create a Tean, you can select the option to make it a public team, that anyone in your organization can join.
The can select to create a Public team
However, in none of my tenants I have seen the opportunity to join such a Public Team. I suppose it will become available later…
Checking who is in my Microsoft Team
All Team participants, even the external Guests, can check who is part of that Team via the ellipsis (the dot dot dot…), selecting Manage Team. Yes, it is strange that this option is labeled Manage Team rather than View Team, because viewing is the only thing non-owners can do. Or you navigate to the root of the Team, where you will find the Members page. The Members page displays all participants: Members as well as Owners and Guests.
All team mates can view who is in the Team, via the option Manage Team. Even guests.
Want to know more about a team member? You can check their place in the organization. This only works for colleagues; external guest cannot see your org chart.
You can get there by hovering over the photo – or photo placeholder – of the colleague you are interested in. In the people pop-up that appears, select the View organization icon.
Hover over the photo or placeholder to get the people pop-up with the option to view their place in the organization.
When you are chatting with a colleague, you can also reach the org chart via the tab Organization.
In the context of a chat with a team mate, view his or her place in the org chart.
So all in all, I am quite pleased with the options we have to collaborate with different team mates in our Teams and to see who is in the Team. Even if not every option is available yet, it works nicely. In particular, external guests have a better collaboration experience in Microsoft Teams than in Office Groups.
