Chat with external & guest users

In Microsoft Teams, you can chat and collaborate with users of other organizations in two different ways.
You can read more about the differences here: Collaborate with people outside your organization.

Chatting with external users

Creating a chat with external users works the same way as with internal users. Just enter the email address of the external contact when creating a chat.

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Check if an external user is available trough Teams chat

There are a few requirements for an external chat to work:

• The external contact needs to have a Microsoft Teams account for their email address

• The organization of the external contact needs to allow chats with your organization

• Your organization needs to allow chats with the external organization

To check if this is possible, you open a new chat in Microsoft Teams and enter the email address of the contact.

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After clicking “Search […] externally” it will show you one of two messages:

Allowing external chats

Please check the following help article by Microsoft on how to configure external access correctly. This will need the help of an Office administrator in both organizations: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-external-access

Chatting with guest users

Chatting with guest users is currently not supported, due to limitations on the Microsoft Teams side.

You can work around this limitation by creating the chat first and then adding the guest user afterwards in Microsoft Teams. It’s a known bug on Microsoft side and we hope to be able to support this soon.

References

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/communicate-with-users-from-other-organizations

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-external-access

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/guest-access