Can I give a mail-enabled user Teams access?

Question

We have people at our organization that provide consulting services. They need access to resources on our network so have an Active Directory account. We sync their accounts to Azure AD and have exchange on-prem. They don’t want another email address or mailbox to manage so we set them up as mail-enabled users. We do this so people can communicate with them and so they can use federated services that require email be populated as the unique identifier.

The problem I have is now someone wants to share documents via Teams with them. We have E5, F3, and F1 licensing. Could they have an F1 license, use Teams, and still be a mail-enabled user or is our only option remove them as a mail-enabled user and give them a mailbox they don’t want?

Answer 1

Hi @EL_3812

Since Teams requires a corresponding Exchange mailbox to function, with F1 license the users would still get an Exchange mailbox.

The difference is that with F1 license they cannot directly access the mailbox, while they can access the mailbox with other licenses like E5,F3.

For more details please refer to this documentation: How Exchange and Microsoft Teams interact

If you are using an external mailbox instead of the Exchange mailbox, there are some features like calendar events which may not be available.

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