Invite guests
Empowering end-users to manage their guests independently is one of the main goals of Guests. Therefore, one important feature is to provide a invitation flow that enables employees to invite their guests autonomously while at the same time ensuring compliance with their companies' governance & lifecycle policies.
In this section you can find further information about the applied invitation flow when inviting new guests for collaboration. Depending on the configuration set by the administrator in the Invitation Flow Policy, you may encounter more or fewer steps in the guest invitation flow that must be completed. Below, all available steps are described.
Get started
To invite a new guest, access the Guests end-user app. Once inside, navigate to the guest list and click on the "+ Invite" button in the toolbar above the guest list. This will initiate the Guest Invitation Flow.
Choose template
You can choose from available templates to invite a new guest. If there is only one template available for the logged-in user, this step will not be stepped over. Contact the administrator in case templates are not available.
Responsible host
In this step, you can define who will be the responsible host for the guests. The step can be turned off by administrators if they do not support guest invitation on behalf of another host. The following options are available:
Option "I’m the host"
Choose this option if you are the designated host responsible for the guest(s), serving as their primary point of contact within the organization. When selecting this option, the current user becomes the responsible host for the guest. The guest will be listed in the "My guests" view within the Teams app.
Option "Someone else is the host"
Choose this option if you are inviting guest(s) on behalf of another responsible host in your organization. When selecting this option, you need to specify the responsible host by choosing their name from the provided list. Assigning another host will result in the guest being visible for the current user under "View all guests".
Add guests
In this mandatory step, users must enter the guest information required by your organization. The email address is always mandatory as it is necessary to invite the external person via email. Each other field is either mandatory or optional and has been predefined by your admin for governance reasons.
Bulk-invite
You can invite up to 20 guests in one go. Click on the "+" icon to add additional forms for additional guests. If the guests share the same properties such as company name, street, or similar, you can duplicate the form to avoid inputting the same information repeatedly.
Guests invited with the same invitation will have the same settings for the host, access, and personal message. The order of the forms does not impact the invitation order.
Grant access
In this optional step, you can add the guest(s) to one or more existing Teams. Adding Teams will automatically grant access for the guests to these team(s). Once a guest is invited, they exist in your Microsoft Entra ID, allowing you to directly add them to existing teams in Microsoft Teams.
Personal message
In this optional step, you can add a personalized message to the invitation for your guest(s). Additionally, you have the option to send a copy of the invitation to another email recipient. You might use this option, for example, to send a copy to yourself or to the responsible host when inviting on behalf of someone else.
Review and invite
This step summarizes your invitation. In the body, you can see the list of guests who will be invited. Expand each guest to ensure the provided information is correct. In the right column, you will find a summary of the general information collected for this invitation. When you click "Invite," the invitation will be sent out, and the guests will appear in the guest list with the invitation status as pending.
Status report
In the final step, the status of each completed task for individual guests and all assigned Microsoft 365 Groups is presented. If every step is marked as successful, there's no further action required on your part. However, if an error occurs, please review the error message and proceed to reexecute the necessary steps.