Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has announced full guest access support in Teams will be rolling out soon. This comes after Microsoft added partial guest support for Azure Active Directory account holders in September of 2017.
Guest Access in Microsoft Teams
With the new availability of this feature, users with business or consumer email address (Outlook.com or Gmail.com) can be invited to participate in Microsoft Teams. Once they are in, they will have access to team chats, meetings and files.
For small businesses hiring freelancers and collaborating with other partners, it means the ability to bring in these individuals to join the conversation and collaboration with just an email account. All you have to do is select Add Members and put the guest’s email address in next to the team name.
Teams with guests will be identified with text and icons throughout the Teams UI to give all team members a clear indication that there are guests in that team.
The video below goes into more detail about how this works.
What About Security?
When a guest is added to your team, their content and activities are covered with the same compliance and auditing protection offered to all Office 365 users. Their account is managed in Azure AD through Azure AD B2B Collaboration, which enables enterprise-grade security. Team administrators can place conditional access policies on guests to further limit their access.
Microsoft also includes the adaptive machine learning algorithms and heuristics in Azure AD to detect suspicious activities and initiate mitigation or remediation actions.
More Improvements in Office 365
The guest support in Teams comes with more improvements to Office 365, which include a new set of AI-powered features to improve content creation and collaboration.
Microsoft Word has a new Editor to improve your writing. A summary will highlight opportunities for correcting and refining your documents with enhancement, including stylistic suggestions that take the context of the overall document into account.
The improvement to Word also extends to creating more compelling resumes using the AI enabled tool called Resume Assistant released last November. Resume Assistant is now available to Office 365 subscribers on Windows.
Some of the other enhancements are: faster access to information with StaffHub; better enforcement of naming conventions across Office 365 Groups; ability to create advanced network diagrams in Visio Online; ability to prepare for GDPR (The European Union’s Global Data Protection Regulation goes into effect May 25, 2018) with new compliance capabilities; and ability to make changes to Office and Windows servicing and support.
Image: Microsoft