Manage Guest Users in Microsoft Teams

Can I centrally control guest access for all teams in Microsoft Teams?

For a good governance structure, it is very important to control guest access to individual teams. Depending on the strategy and type of existing team, guest access can be allowed or blocked. The External User Manager makes it very easy to automatically disable guest access for all teams located on the tenant. If you want to exclude individual teams, you can add them to a whitelist.

How do I keep track of all guest accesses in Microsoft Teams?

If people outside your own company have access to entire projects or individual documents via Teams, it is very important to keep track of these accesses. In the request overview of the External User Manager, administrators can see all guest requests that have been approved, rejected or are up for review. Here, the respective status, as well as the team affiliation, the access time and much more information can be viewed.

What do I do with inactive guests on my tenant?

Especially in projects, Teams as a collaboration software enables different people to work together. After a successful project completion, it often happens that both the teams and their guest accesses are forgotten – however, the access remains without any manual effort. With the External User Manager, you can assign a lifecycle to each active guest. This automatically initiates a new check by the team owner after a self-definable period of time. If the user is removed from the last team, the External User Manager can automatically remove him from Azure AD. Thus, no data garbage is created in the background.

Do I have to create guests manually in Azure AD to manage them?

Guest accounts can generally be created individually in Azure AD. For guests added to a team or requested for a team using External User Manager, an Azure AD guest account is created after the process is complete.

Do I need special permissions to use External User Manager?

Teams users often have different permissions. External User Manager can be downloaded and installed from the Microsoft Teams App Store within minutes. During the initial installation, the tenant admin must initially grant the External User Manager a permission set. Any additional users or administrators of the app do not require any special permissions.

Who is responsible for guest requests in Microsoft Teams?

Typically, only IT administrators or M365 consultants are authorized to control settings in the Teams Admin Center and Azure AD. With External User Manager, you can share this responsibility. The person who initially installs the External User Manager on the tenant is created as the External User Manager administrator. This person can add additional administrators or pass on responsibility to team owners about their teams’ guest requests.

Can I get a report of all guest accesses in Microsoft Teams?

For auditing purposes, it is important to back up information about accounts, especially if they have had access to the corporate tenant and associated data. With External User Manager, you can have each guest go through an onboarding process before accessing the tenant. In this process, External User Manager administrators can have guests sign confidentiality documents, fill in user-definable metadata fields, or watch videos. Only then are guest users granted access to the tenant and to a team. This information can be downloaded and archived as an access report for each active guest access.