Collaborating with members of external organisations in Microsoft Teams

Inviting external collaborators to join an Oxford Team or Meeting

If you want to invite external collaborators to a Meeting you can simply invite them by email address. Usually this will be sufficient. If you want to make it more secure and make them a "trusted collaborator" you would need to add them to an Oxford Team. If they already are using MS Teams in another organisation, then you will want to add their "Teams address" as described below.

If they do not have a MS Teams account yet, you will need to ask them for their preferred email address and ask them download and install MS Teams from http://teams.microsoft.com/downloads, but not to login yet. Whilst they can use in a browser, they will get a better experience by installing the application on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer. Once you have added the address to your team they will then receive an invitation to create a guest Teams account which they can then use to login to Teams. After that you can in all your scheduled meetings, in "Meeting options" specify "Who can bypass the lobby?" => "People in my organization and trusted organizations". This will ensure that only authenticated people can get to a meeting directly and gate-crashing can be avoided. Unauthenticated people who got in the posession of a meeting link would still be able to get to the lobby, but as long as they are not admitted into the meeting they would not be able to join.

Joining Teams in other organisations using the same account 

When you get invited to an external team, you need to ensure that you are invited on the right email address, as Microsoft will otherwise ask you to create a new account and you would have to sign in and out of teams to  switch between accounts. The "Teams email address" could be your college or departmental address. To find out the right address please visit

https://myaccount.microsoft.com/ 

and login, if required, with your normal Teams credentials. You should then see your Teams address underneath your name. This is the address the external organisation needs to invite you on. Once they have done this and you have successfully joined the team you can use the organisation selector on the top right to select between the organisations. Note that the Oxford one is called "Nexus365".

Screenshot

 

Last updated on 2 Apr 2022, 10:26pm. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.