Microsoft Teams, a part of Office 365, enables collaboration using people, conversations, content, and apps to enable successful team interaction. Previously guest members of the team must have an Azure Active Directory account. This is now no longer required. Although a Microsoft account is required, the individual can have an email account from domains such as gmail, yahoo, or any corporate email domain. If the individual within the team does not have a Microsoft account linked with that email address, Microsoft will simply assist them in obtaining this on the fly.
Teams provides the same enterprise-grade security as it does with other like products. Admins have the ability to monitor and report on the activities of these external guests.
One of the questions I have is how this relates to many of the channels or other integrations with Teams. For example, Stream has always been an AAD account only product. Is this now expanding its guest account capabilities? Microsoft has posted back that the two are not related and Stream content will still only be accessible to AAD team member accounts.
I agree with your Slack comparison, I agree that Microsoft seems to be heavily committed to Teams, but with that typically comes mass confusion as so many things are being introduced at the same time, with limited functionality and an aggressive update and release pattern.
I am also interested in seeing where this goes. As far as BEC (my company) is concerned this can be of use to us with our calendaring, collaboration and resource sharing functionality. We are definitely watching this mature and will jump in when it makes sense.
Thanks Matt!
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. This was the one significant competitive advantage that Slack had over Teams.
While I expect that Slack’s interface and sign-up process will remain more intuitive, this makes it all the more compelling for organizations already heavily invested in Microsoft to stick with them for collaboration.