New guest access update for Microsoft Teams: Are you ready?

Gasttoegang binnen Microsoft Teams stelt u in staat om externe gebruikers buiten uw organisatie toe te voegen aan bepaalde teams en kanalen, met de mogelijkheid om documentatie binnen en buiten het bedrijf te bekijken, samen te werken en te delen.

Guest access within Microsoft Teams has always been disabled by default until now.

Team owners with specific permissions, along with IT administrators, have always had to enable guest access to add an external guest – and it would usually take a few hours for the changes to take effect.

Most other users who try to add an external guest to a team will be notified to see “Contact your admin,” which means guest access is not enabled and they have to go through the necessary approval processes to add a third party to a team.

No more.

As of February 8, 2021, Microsoft will enable standard Guest Access in Microsoft Teams.

This applies to all new customers as well as existing customers who have yet to configure the guest access setting. That means that each user can add an external contact to each team. At all times.

While this update makes it easier to work with parties outside your organization, it can also pose huge security issues.

What you can do about it

If you haven’t configured guest access in Teams, this new functionality will automatically turn on in your tenant. In addition, all new tenants are enabled with guest access enabled.

However, you can make sure that all users don’t have to worry about this. Because all administrators can easily control which teams guest access is enabled for. End users can be empowered to request new teams with simple guest access choices, in business language they understand. Predefined templates can also be configured with different guest access rules. For example, teams used for projects want the option to enable guest access. Conversely, we recommend that guest access be disabled for internal teams that contain confidential information.

Many organizations choose to use other features in ProvisionPoint 365 to implement broader management rules for Team Guest Access. This can include asking for additional information from users to determine why guest access should be enabled, specific authorization workflows, lifecycle policies, and naming conventions to emphasize that a team has been shared externally.

If you want guest access to remain disabled for your organization after this Microsoft update, you must confirm that the guest access setting is set to “Off” instead of “Default Service.” Of course, if guest access is already enabled, you don’t have to do anything.

Source: provisionpoint