Collaborate with freelancers on Microsoft Teams

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Use this guide to get started with Microsoft Teams for team-wide collaboration between your employees and freelancers.

Step 1: Authorize guest access on Teams

For your organization to collaborate with freelancers on Teams, you need to turn on guest access, which is turned off by default. Depending on your needs, you can use various levels of authorization to manage guest access to features and capabilities on Office 365.

Check your organizational policies to see how you should regulate guest access.

Note

Guest access differs from external access (federation) in that guests can access channels, files, and other resources of the team they have been explicitly invited into. Guests can also chat with and call members of the team. With external access (federation), external users can only chat with or call users in your organization. They cannot access any other resources. Learn more about giving access to users from other orgs

Step 2: Start inviting freelancers to your teams

Invite your freelancers to Microsoft Teams free so they can start collaborating with your org, and then add them to your project teams. Read the articles below for more information:

Note

When a project ends, you can easily remove freelancers from a team, and they will cease to receive project and document updates.

Step 3: Prep your project teams

For efficient collaboration on Teams, optimize each of your freelance project teams:

Next steps

The newly deployed team serves as your project hub for project-specific communications, file sharing, and status tracking. To learn how your employees and freelancers can take full advantage of this hub, learn from our own experiences.

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a ribbon. Best practices for collaboration. Learn what's worked for us with these tips on streamlining collaboration between employees and freelancers.

Questions and feedback

Want to discuss your freelance program? Need help getting set up? Have feedback about this toolkit? Email M365ToolkitSupport@microsoft.com.