Microsoft 365 Blog: Updates & News

Orchestry’s Teams Guest Access Management Overview

Written by David Francoeur | Nov 11, 2022 8:00:00 AM

M365 Admins have expressed frustration over the years about their lack of control over Microsoft Teams Guest Access.

Microsoft Teams Guest Access limitations are what inspired us to add MS Teams Guest User Management features to Orchestry. Our blog provides an overview of the features that can assist Team Owners and Administrators in managing Guest Access in Teams. We will cover Dashboards and Insights, Guest Reviews, and Guest Request Policies.

Guest Dashboard

The Guest Dashboard gives you a complete overview of all Teams accounts not managed by your organization. You can also use it to access pre-built Insight Reports that help you gain insights into your Guests in Teams.

The Guest Dashboard is a tool that helps you manage your Guest Accounts. It provides recommendations for your administrators to take action on. These recommendations include things like:

  • MS Teams Guest Access violations
  • Guests with multiple accounts in Azure AD
  • Microsoft Teams Guests without access
  • Guests who haven’t accepted their invitations
  • Microsoft Teams Guest accounts that can be deleted
  • And more!

Insight Reports

Insight Reports provide you with important aggregated information about your Guests, updated on a nightly basis. Orchestry has pre-built Insights, which are views of guest information. They are extremely useful for understanding Microsoft Teams Guest attributes or seeing different segments of accounts in a single view.

The views include:

  • All Guests in your tenant
  • Microsoft Teams Guests with multi-access
  • The list of unique domains which Guests come from
  • MS Teams Guests recommended for deletion
  • Guests with access violations
  • Guests without access to any workspaces in your tenant
  • Active/inactive Guests
  • Recently invited Guests/Guests who have been requested
  • Guests who have not redeemed their invitations
  • Guests whose access is pending review or approval
  • Guests whose access has recently been renewed
  • Guests who have recently been deleted

Orchestry allows Administrators to see a detailed view of each Guest's current status and properties. Additionally, admins can view the actions that have been applied to the user in the past. This can be accessed either through an Insight Report or a search function.

 

Policies

Guest Policies allow organizations to automate and control the management of Guests. They also help manage how users can add someone external to Microsoft Teams.

Admins using Orchestry can create Guest Request Policies. These will require team members to collect additional information about Guests when adding external users to Teams. Only then the Guests can be added to new Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams.

Guest review policies help ensure existing Microsoft Teams external Guest Access is regularly reviewed. This is done to ensure the access granted is still legitimate.

Check out our blog to learn how Orchestry can help you implement Guest Review policies in just three easy steps.

Watch Orchestry’s Director of Product David Francoeur demonstrate these powerful features in this video.

Want to see Teams Guest Access Management features in action?

With Guest Management and Insights in Orchestry, you can control Microsoft 365 Guest Access, and improve security, and Guest experience. All without incurring extra expenses on licenses.  

  • Implement a repeatable Guest and external access review process to ensure compliance, and reduce security risks and issues.  
  • Improve external collaboration.
  • Automatically communicate with Teams users and require Workspace Owners to gather more information from Guests. This includes company name, contact details, phone number, manager, and location. Make approval decisions based on full context about Guest users. 
  • With Orchestry, you can easily view and manage the full lifecycle of Guests. From the time team members add guests to Office 365 to when it's appropriate to remove their access. Additionally, you can assign periodic Guest reviews to Workspace Owners or a group of users.  
  • Give the Workspace Owners the power to see all guests within a Team, their status, invite redemptions, and even resend invites. 

Orchestry users save on average USD$4.35M* (according to IBM’s 2022 Cost of Data Breach Report) by avoiding security breaches and data leaks.