External Access (federation) for DirSync'd users - supported?

Question

Hi

I am working through a support issue and just wanted to get some feedback/advice from the community.

We have on premise Active Directory, with ADConnect, syncing our users into AzureAD. The users in question are working properly, no provisioning errors reports, they already had their mailboxes migrated into 365, we are also using sharepoint and other services with no issues.

We are trying to setup communication with external domains and are having some difficulty. I have been through all the configuration guides and everything is configured correctly as far as I can tell but we are unable to search/start a chat with external users, the option to search externally just doesn't appear.

I raised a ticket with support and they have run through the usual process of checking all the basic configurations etc. After this they have been scratching their heads for a couple of days and have just informed me that communicating with external users is not supported, if the user on our side is sync'd from an on-premise AD - a 'Hybrid' user.  I am having a little difficulty believing this, surely the vast majority of teams users still have an on premise AD and are syncing their users using ADConnect/Dirsync the way we are?

I'd just like to get a second opinion on this, I've spent a fair amount of time looking and can find no reference to this limitation/restriction. 

Thanks

Max

Answer 1

Dear Max,

In my own experience with synced users, if those users you assign it an "Exchange Online" service and Teams license, they can use Teams and communicate with external/guest users without any problem, first you should to verify overall configuration for "external/guest" sharing and communications:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/...

See more in below link:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams...

Then verify external communication in Skype for business legacy portal:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SkypeForBusine...

Now, you should wait up to 48 hours. Any time you change the external communications settings, it can take up to 24 hours for the changes to populate across all the data centers.

After, open Microsoft Teams, create a new team, and add guest as a members, see the process in below link:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-...

What guests has to do:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams...

By other hand, if your users doesn't has an "Exchange Online" license, instead has a On-prem Exchange server, the process will be different, and a little more complex.

Regards,

Renzo.