How to add participants to an existing group chat. I can't add external users to my existing Teams group.

Question

I can't add external users to my existing Teams group - it keeps creating new groups instead.

How to fix this?

Answer 1

Hello Pattamaporn Ruchtasomboon,

Good day to you!

Thank you for posting in the Microsoft community, based on the information you have share with us; I understand you have a concern regarding adding the external users to an existing chat group.

To be able to add a normal internal user in the existing Team chat group you can use the following steps:

1. Choose or be active in the existing group chat that you need to add the participants to.
2. Select View and add participants  below your profile picture at the upper-right of Teams.  You'll see a small number next to it showing how many members are currently in the group. Then choose Add people .
3. Type the person's email address, phone number, or tag. Then, choose if and how much of the chat history you want to include. Select Add. You’ll then see those people added to the group chat. If there isn’t an immediate name match for a person (no results found), choose Search [email address of person] externally to send them a chat invite.
4. To start or continue the chat, type a message in the text box at the bottom and then select Send .

However, if you would like to add an external user to an existing Team chat group, the chat group must have already an existing external participant in the chat group. when there is no existing external participant, a new chat group is created when trying to add an external user.

Add or invite people outside your org to a chat in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Support [cc55-051b-023-93d5]

As this is the current design for this feature, I would suggest suggesting design change to Microsoft feature development team through users' feedback tool. This tool allows users to describe the feature in detail and submit it directly to our product development team for review. The product team use featured suggested by the customers to develop new features and update the existing features.

You can submit your suggestion directly by posting on Ideas · Community (microsoft.com). or from Microsoft Teams application.

In the top right corner of Teams application click (...) settings and more>>Feedback>>suggest a feature