In October 2021, Microsoft will enable the Azure AD email one-time passcode identity provider in tenants. SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business will use the provider to control access for external people to its resources. The net effect is that Azure AD will create guest accounts for external sharing recipients. Even though guest accounts need to be managed, there’s lots of good reasons to use guest accounts, as we describe here.
Blocking domains through the Azure AD B2B collaboration policy stops group owners adding new guest accounts from certain domains. It does nothing about existing guests from those domains. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to check the guest membership of Groups and Teams to find guests from the blocked domains. And once you know those problem guests, you can decide what to do up to and including removing guest accounts from the tenant.
Yammer networks configured in Microsoft 365 mode now support Azure B2B collaboration guest users. Which is nice, if it worked. But it doesn’t for me. Guest access worked for me during the testing phase but now that the feature has reached general availability, it won’t – using the same accounts. It’s odd. Yammer’s implementation of Azure B2B Collaboration has some other quirks too, all of which mean that it’s not very usable.
Office 365 administrators can update Azure AD guest accounts with photos. Guests can do the job themselves using three PowerShell commands. Other approaches work too, but this is the easiest and quickest method to do the job, especially if you have guest accounts in multiple tenants.
A new preview feature allows the resources available to an Azure AD guest account to be reassigned to another email address. It’s a nice feature, but Teams has some problems with it at present. On the upside, everything works great with SharePoint Online and Planner, and we’re sure that Microsoft will fix the problem with Teams soon.
The Teams Windows and MacOS desktop clients will soon allow users to add a personal account to the set of Office 365 tenants they connect to. A great deal of excitement ensued after people saw Microsoft 365 roadmap item 68845 and assumed this meant that Teams would support connections with multiple work accounts. The ability to add more than one work account to your Teams profile isn’t available now as the update is to support connectivity to Teams at home (personal), but support for multiple work accounts is coming in the future.
Over time, you might join several Office 365 tenants as a guest. Some of those Azure AD guest accounts probably won’t be needed forever and you want to clean them up. This is easy for individuals to do through their MyAccount page, which might just be a page that they never knew existed.
Office 365 makes extensive use of Azure Active Directory guest accounts. Implementing a risky sign-in policy is a good idea, but it can have the unfortunate side-effect of suddenly blocking guest accounts that could previously access tenant resources. If blocks happen, they can only be lifted through administrative intervention in the guest account’s home tenant.
Microsoft has launched email one-time passcodes (OTP) into preview for Azure Active Directory guest accounts. It’s all to do with better collaboration. OTP doesn’t support Teams, Planner, or Office 365 Groups yet, but it can be used to share documents from SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business.
Now that we know all about the different email addresses used by Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams, the question arises of how to include a team channel as a member of a distribution group. As it turns out, there’s a simple way and a more complicated way.
