Teams Sharing Channel with External Users Not Working

Question

We have already added the external users as guest in Azure AD and they have received the invite. In Teams users can search for the external users by name and start a chat session with them. The owner of the shared channel cannot add the external users though. They keep getting the message "We could find any matches. Make sure the email address is correct." I have gone through the article below multi times to make sure everything is setup to support this and cannot find anything out of place.

Thoughts???

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/solutions/collaborate-teams-direct-connect?view=o365-worldwide

Answer 1

@rr-4098

Did you add the guest user in your shared channel?

To troubleshoot your issue, you could try to follow these steps to check it:

Step1:   Confirm the address with an outside agency and check that the address you entered is the same.

Step2:   Please make sure that the external user you are adding is not a guest who has already been invited to the organization. Because guests can't be added to shared channels. When you share a channel with a team that has guests, the guests won't get access to the shared channel. You could find the evidence from this article.

Step3:   Check if the Guest Access on the Microsoft 365 is enabled.  As shown in the figure below, guest settings for M365 Groups must be enabled.

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Answer 2

After reading the article below is should like shared channel will only work if the remote organization is in o365 as well.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/solutions/plan-external-collaboration?view=o365-worldwide

Below is from the article..

External participants in shared channels

External participants access shared resources in your organization by using their own Azure AD or Microsoft 365 identity. This is enabled by Azure AD B2B direct connect through an organizational relationship configured by both organizations. Guest accounts are not used in this relationship.

The primary advantage of external participants in shared channels versus guest sharing is that people outside your organization can collaborate with your users in Teams without having to change their user context. When using guest accounts, users must sign out of Teams with their work or school account and sign in again using the guest account. Alternatively, they can have a separate copy of Teams running in a private browser session. This switching between organizations takes time and can cause users to miss important communications while signed out of a given organization.

With shared channels, users can remain signed in to their organization and access channels shared with them from other organizations. Shared channels from other organizations are available in Teams alongside the teams and channels in your organization. There is no need to switch organizations.