In this blog series I’ve been looking at some of the bumps in the road we encounter when bringing collaboration technology like Microsoft Teams into our working lives. I know I’ve experienced all of them, hopefully it’s given you something to relate to!

The seventh and final deadly sin for this blog is; forgetting who is in a team and therefore potentially sharing information that you shouldn’t!  

If guest access is enabled in your organisation, this means that you can add people from outside your organisation to a Teams team. The guest can see and send messages to channels in that team, and also access any files within that team.

This is why it’s important to consider a few things when you’re using Teams with guests.

Before either inviting guests to a team think about:

• Are there any documents already in the team that the guest user should not have access to?
• Is there any message history that the guest should not see?

Before you share information inside a Team or channel think about:

• Are there any guests with access to the team?
• If yes, is it appropriate for them to see the information you are about to share?

For example, you might invite a customer to be a guest in your team to make it easier to collaborate on a project together. However, if that team includes channels that contain a lot of pre-contractual information, like discussions on project pricing, named resources, or any ‘politics’ around the deal (I wasn’t going to include that, but I think we all know that it happens sometimes) then you probably would not want your customer guest to be privy to all that information.

It would be safer to start with a new, empty, team, which is explicit somewhere (either in the name or a pinned post) about including guest access. Then you don’t run the risk of the external guest accessing any historical information, and users in the team moving forward have a heads-up about sharing appropriate information.

There are other settings that Team owners can apply at a team level to lock down what guest users can and can’t do, like creating channels:

Plus, channel owners can also set permissions for guests, such as whether or not they can start new posts (you can find this in channel settings):

And some organisations simply don’t turn on guest access at all!

You can find out more from Microsoft’s Learn resources about turning on guest access here. You can also find out about what the guest experience is like here.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and if you missed the other 6 deadly sins you can check them out here:

Deadly sin number 1: https://lyndsay.blog/2023/01/11/the-7-deadly-sins-of-microsoft-teams-starting-a-new-thread-instead-of-replying-to-one/

Deadly sin number 2: https://lyndsay.blog/2023/01/18/the-7-deadly-sins-of-microsoft-teams-thinking-youre-on-mute-but-youre-not/

Deadly sin number 3: https://lyndsay.blog/2023/01/25/the-7-deadly-sins-of-microsoft-teams-not-sending-a-document-in-chat-doh/

Deadly sin number 4: https://lyndsay.blog/2023/02/01/the-7-deadly-sins-of-microsoft-teams-using-group-chat-for-everything-instead-of-teams-and-channels/

Deadly sin number 5: https://lyndsay.blog/2023/02/09/the-7-deadly-sins-of-microsoft-teams-next-slide-please-use-powerpoint-live-in-teams-meetings-instead/

Deadly sin number 6: https://lyndsay.blog/2023/02/15/the-7-deadly-sins-of-microsoft-teams-using-email-for-internal-discussions/

Thanks for reading!