Teams - Anonymous users or Guests

Ever wondered how this works? Yes, after a long journey here is the outcome of some tests.

• Guests - people who are logged in to Teams in your organization using a guest account. Guests appear with "(Guest)" appended to their name in meetings.

• People from trusted organizations - people who are logged in to Teams in other Microsoft 365 organizations that you have a mutual trust relationship with. People from trusted organizations appear with "(External)" appended to their name in meetings.

• Anonymous - people whose identity can't be verified. They may be logged in to an organization without a mutual trust relationship or they may not have an account. Anonymous participants appear with "(Unverified)" appended to their name in meetings.

Example in practice:

Anonymous people invited through Teams

(not using the invitation link)

What happens if I disable

and invite anonymous users through Teams?

People outside your organization, who are not verified =anonymous user, cannot join a Teams Meeting.

The same applies by providing them with the link Invitation.

Scenario:

Invited people could be external customers, suppliers ...Since we do not know from what Organisation your participant is coming from, this setting is quite restrictive and, in most cases, not practical.

Example Emails: yahoo.com, mailbox.org and so on.

SharePoint

Anonymous users invited through Teams (remember, they cannot join a Teams meeting) still get an invitation.

and they can access the SharePoint Site of the Teams Group they are invited from.

Yes!

SharePoint Settings are independent from Teams Settings.

What happens if I enable

Anonymous users can join Teams meetings, even they are not verified.

Summary:

External guests are users, who are Microsoft verified like, other tenants, outlook.com and/or trusted domains.

External guests have more rights and features as anonymous users in Teams.

By allowing Anonymous users in Teams:

Anonymous users are users, who are not verified, like mailbox.org, and not ‘related’ to Microsoft.

Anonymous users have less rights and features, therefore restricted access.

Although Anonymous users are seen as security risk, it is not practical to disable the function in Teams.

Their invitation is initiated through a link in their calendar by accepting the meeting through an email notification.