Signing in to Teams when we are only a guest to multiple other tenants

Question

Hello,

I do not know the extent to which this could be a dumb question.

The issue is that 1 of our users regularly experiences major issues signing in to Teams (both on the Web and in the Desktop App, and when using any computer). The complication is that we do not own any Teams licenses - instead, we are only guests to multiple different business partners' tenants/domains.

But when the user does manage to get signed in, they do not experience any issues accessing any of the business partners' Teams accounts. And the issue occurs just when navigating to teams.microsoft.com and attempting to sign in, or just when attempting to open and log in to the Teams desktop app (new). In other words, the user is only generically attempting to sign in - without somehow making an attempt to access any 1 particular partner's tenant/domain.

Additionally, I discovered that I can see the login failures in my admin access in Entra ID. And the "resource tenant ID" and "home tenant ID" are both the same, so I am assuming that this is somehow specific to our tenant/domain (as opposed to any of our business partners).

The sign-in error code is 7000112, which is apparently "application disabled". That sort of makes sense, because we don't have any Teams licenses. However, there must be some way of managing this scenario wherein we only have guest access to other tenants/domains. I am not aware of any way that I can "enable" or "manage" the (nonexistent) Teams application in our tenant/domain just for the sake of bypassing this issue. We did have a Microsoft Teams Exploratory Trial, but that expired, and I don't believe I can access it anymore.

We do have some licenses of Microsoft 365 Apps for Business, and those licenses were purchased through Dell, so it seems like Dell is my only contact available for support (e.g. seeking support through admin.microsoft.com). But Dell is telling me that they cannot assist, because we haven't purchased any Teams licenses from them.

Can anyone make any suggestions either to debug this issue or to contact whoever could assist?

Answer 1

Hi @etb

Great to know that the issue has already been resolved and thanks for sharing the solution so that others experiencing the same thing can easily reference this! Since the Microsoft Q&A community has a policy that The question author cannot accept their own answer. They can only accept answers by others, I'll repost your solution in case you'd like to Accept the answer.

 

Case Title: Signing in to Teams when we are only a guest to multiple other tenants

 

Issue Symptom: we want to be able to log in to our Microsoft accounts and then navigate to one of the tenants in which we are a guest for Teams. But we basically can't log in at all, so we can't navigate to one of the other tenants.

 

Resolution: There are 21different "applications" which are all apparently associated with the functionalities of Microsoft Teams. I looked through the properties each of these "applications" in Entra ID, and I found that just 2 or 3 of them had the setting "Enabled for users to sign-in?" set to "No". Once I changed those to "Yes" and saved, then our affected user was able to sign in to Teams.

 

Thanks for your understanding and support.

Answer 2

Hi @etb

The reason you can access Teams as a guest user is because your partner tenant has the "Allow Guest access in Teams" feature enabled.

Within your own tenant, if you want to enable Teams, you must purchase licenses for users and assign the licenses to the users who need them.

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Answer 3

As I briefly described in my comment above, the testing with the affected user seems to have been a success. So I'm just updating here in case anyone should ever have the same problem and come across this thread.

We do not use Entra ID, so I am not very familiar with it. But I found that there are 21(!!) different "applications" which are all apparently associated with the functionalities of Microsoft Teams. I looked through the properties each of these "applications" in Entra ID, and I found that just 2 or 3 of them had the setting "Enabled for users to sign-in?" set to "No". Once I changed those to "Yes" and saved, then our affected user was able to sign in to Teams.

The login flow is now basically what I would expect it to be in our situation. Upon login, the user is presented with a notice that they do not have access to Teams for our domain (because we don't have Teams in our domain). But then the user is presented with the option to select from a dropdown list to connect to one of our business partners' Teams accounts instead. That makes complete sense, and that is what I was trying to accomplish here. Prior to my fixing these Entra ID settings, the user would just get something like a "oops, something went wrong, please try again" error each time (with no ability to connect to any particular tenant).

I had definitely never been in Entra ID before, so I definitely did not manually turn off those sign-in permissions myself. I'm guessing that these settings being set to "no" represents Microsoft's migrations of various other settings which may have existed multiple years ago.

So [fingers crossed] I believe my issue is resolved, and I'm just sharing in case it helps anyone in the future. If you see a login error like "the application is disabled", check for the potentially quite numerous Entra ID settings and permissions.