Organizational collaboration comes to Microsoft Teams

Collaborating with others outside your organization in Microsoft Teams will soon be possible with a new update to Microsoft’s online collaboration tool.

Workgroups often extend beyond their own organization with employees interacting with multiple external stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, and partners. Until now, however, users had to rely on various software or even personal apps to work with them.

Not only does this require employees to use multiple apps, which takes longer and can reduce their productivity, it also creates security risks for both employees and their companies.

For this reason, Microsoft is currently working on two updates that will leverage Microsoft Teams Connect and the secure access capabilities of Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to make inter-organizational collaboration easier for businesses.

Collaboration between organizations

The first update includes shared channels that allow individuals and teams in multiple organizations to collaborate in Microsoft Teams. When this feature becomes available in preview early next year, shared channels will appear within each member’s Teams tenant alongside other teams and channels.

Users can also schedule a meeting with a shared channel, use other Microsoft apps like Office, and share each channel with up to 50 teams and as many organizations as they need. Meanwhile, administrators can use multi-tenant access settings in Azure AD to configure granular and differentiated trusts for remote collaboration with different organizations.

Microsoft is also working on another update to be rolled out by the end of this year that will allow Teams users to chat with others outside their network, including those using personal Teams accounts. They can invite any Teams user to chat using an email address or phone number, while staying within their organization’s security and compliance policies.

Organizational collaboration is the Teams update that many users have been waiting for, as it will make Microsoft’s collaboration tool and video conferencing software a one-stop shop for all their business transactions, both internal and external.

Source: tech radar