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How to share and collaborate on files/documents in Teams with external folks (guests)?

Anonymous
2022-06-24T16:05:00+00:00

My team includes three people within the organization and two outside the organization (i.e. guests) who also use Teams, and we regularly share and collaborate on many large Excel and PDF files. We're able to have calls/meetings in Teams (the two guests show up as "external" in Teams chat. Currently we each save these files on our own organization's network drives and exchange latest version through SecureFileExchange but the process is slow, inefficient and difficult for version control. I just uploaded some files in hope to share with the entire team and collaborate through Teams instead. However, the "guests" do not seem to be able to see or access the files I uploaded. What could be the potential issues and how can I fix it?

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-06-24T17:55:31+00:00

    In my experience External members of a team site cannot collaborate on files stored within teams because teams stores documents on a SharePoint site which an external guest wont be able to access (you might be able to add them to the SharePoint site but I have not tested this).

    To get around this I would create a One Drive Shared folder to collaborate with your external members and then have a link to the one drive folder within your Team site either via link in chat then Pin the message or by creating a shortcut in the files section.

    Sorry for saying teams so much!!

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-06-24T19:57:51+00:00

    Hi P, my name is Jose, a Teams user like you. I'll be glad to help you today.

    After an external Teams user is added as guest to another organization, the user has access to two organizations. To access to resources in the second one organization, the user must switch between organizations. For this, the guest must open Teams then click on the user profile icon in the upper right corner, then both organizations will be listed. Then they have to select the second one. Their Teams interface will changes to show the team and documents inside.

    To return to their native organization, the guest user must repeat the process but selecting the other organization.

    Please let me know if you need any further assistance.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-06-30T14:09:21+00:00

    Thank you Jose! Yes I do have two Teams instances that I can toggle between the two organizations' Teams. Initially that created quite a bit of instability as Teams was acting up quite a bit, like incoming calls no longer ring, or my screen starts to flash wildly when someone else starts to share their screen. I believe that problem has since been fixed and eventually I was able to add the two team members from the other organizations as "external" instead of "guest" and same time messaging them. So calls and meetings and sharing screens run pretty smoothly now. However, we still can't use Teams to share and collaborate on large files, that can only be achieve via SharePoint and/or OneDrive. Our company uses OneDrive the other organization does not so they can only use SharePoint to work with the files. SharePoint alone works fine alone but not as flexible or easy as if one also has OneDrive, based on my experience so far.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-06-24T18:51:54+00:00

    Our team tried to share the files in OneDrive this morning and it worked. Thanks so much!

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