Microsoft Teams users can now chat with Teams users outside the organization

Microsoft announced this week that an update to Microsoft Teams Chat now allows users to communicate and chat with Teams users outside their own organization. To facilitate communication on the Microsoft Teams platform, simply invite any Teams user to chat by entering their full email address or phone number. Once accepted, you can start a one-on-one or group chat with anyone with a personal Microsoft account, without having to switch tenants.

The new Microsoft Teams Chat feature is now rolling out and starts chatting with external users through the Teams platform. Microsoft explains a little more about how to set it up depending on your access permissions. If you are not the administrator of the Microsoft Teams platform within your company, you may need to seek help from your IT department.

To start a chat with users of a personal Team account:

• Organization-managed Teams users can invite personal Team account users to chat with by entering their full email address or phone number. Teams personal users can enter the exact organizational email address of the user they want to reach and attempt to start a chat.
• If the person you want to chat with isn’t already a Teams user, they’ll receive an email or text inviting them to join the conversation with a personal account. When they register and log in to their personal Teams account, they can join the chat.
• Once the person you invited accepts the invitation, you can start a new 1:1 or group chat or even add to an existing external group chat. This chat thread will appear alongside your other chats, no renter switching is required to view the chat.
• Express yourself, as part of your chat you can send and receive rich messages, GIFs and media.
• Be alone in the conversations you want to be in. You can block messages from external users or leave a group chat.
• Teams users managed by an organization and users of a personal Team account have the option to decline external invitations. One can message an external user up to 10 times before they accept it, but if the message is not accepted after 10 messages, you cannot send additional messages to this user.

Teams chat with external organizations

“It takes a lot of communication to run your business: collaborating with colleagues, sharing with partners, follow-ups with suppliers and contact with customers. Microsoft Teams offers secure solutions to collaborate with external parties and with Microsoft Teams Connect we make it even easier to collaborate with anyone outside your organization. Teams allows commercial users to chat with commercial users in other organizations.

Based on this, you can chat with team members outside of your organization, even if they use a personal Teams account. These accounts are often used by SMB, so this new capability helps you to strengthen relationships with external partners.“

Source: geeky gadgets