How to invite guest or external users to Microsoft Teams Meetings

In this Microsoft teams tutorial, we will discuss how to invite guest or external users to Microsoft teams meetings. You can invite anyone to a Microsoft teams meeting.

What are guest users or external users in Microsoft teams

For an organization, guest users are the users who are not part of the organization. Those users are also known as the external users who are not part of your organization.

As an organization, you do not require a license for your external users to join your teams meeting. I will show you how to invite an external user to Microsoft teams meeting?

Also you may check the below Teams tutorials:

• How to leave an organization as a guest user in Microsoft Teams
• How to create a group in Microsoft teams (ms teams Group Call and Group Chat)
• Microsoft teams settings + Turn on New Meeting Experience

Enable Anonymous users can join a meeting in Microsoft Teams Admin center

Microsoft teams allows us to invite anonymous users to join teams meetings. But it also provides an option to enable or disable anonymous users joining meeting option from the Microsoft Teams admin center.

Log in to https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/ and then from the left side select Meetings -> Meeting settings.

Then in the Participants, Toggle On for Anonymous users can join a meeting like below:

You can even customize the Email invitation, by providing the logo URL, Legal URL, Help URL and Footer in the same page like below:

Microsoft teams invite external guest to meeting

Now, let us see how to invite external guest to meetings in Microsoft teams.

Let us first schedule a meeting in Microsoft Teams.

By this time, I have either you have downloaded and installed Microsoft Teams on your system or even you can access Teams from the browser (https:/teams.microsoft.com).

Open Microsoft teams and then from the left navigation click on Calendar.

Then you can click on any date to create or schedule your meeting.

Or even from the top right corner click on + New meeting and then click on Schedule meeting like below:

This will open the New meeting form, where you can enter the meeting details like Meeting Title, Attendees, Date and time, Channel, location and also you can add the meeting description.

Here, in the attendee’s box, when you will add a user from your organization it will search an add (Bhawana Rathore is an Office 365 user), but when I added the external user or the guest user (in this case a gmail.com id) then it will ask to invite. Here select Invite the user.

It will not give any error, rather it will add the user and will send the meeting invite to the user also.

Once you click on the Send button, the meeting will be created and you can see in the Microsoft Teams meeting calendar.

The guest user will also get an email like this with the meeting details with a Join Microsoft Teams Meeting link like below:

To join the meeting, just click on the “Join Microsoft Teams Meeting” to join the meeting. This will open the browser, where you have the option to Open Microsoft Teams (if you have installed), else it will provide the option to download the windows app.

But the good thing is that you can join the teams meeting using a browser, you can click on Continue on this browser. This way you can join the meeting in the browser.

You can use any browser like Microsoft Edge, IE 11, Google Chrome, Opera, Mozilla, etc.

This will open the Meeting now dialog box, where the user can just enter the Name, can enable or disable audio or video, and then click on Join now to join the Teams meeting.

If the meeting is not started, you can see a message like “When the meeting starts, we’ll let people know you’re waiting‘.

Now, when the organizer starts the meeting, they can see a dialog box, that shows the Guest user is waiting in the lobby and the option to View Lobby and Admit.

Once the organizer clicks on the Admit, then the guest user will be joined in the meeting.

In the meeting, click on the Participants icon and you can see the participants currently in the meeting.

You can see the guest user in the meeting also.

In Microsoft Teams meeting, you can make an attendee to a guest users.

Click on … and then click on Make an attendee.

Once you make then attendee, the guest user can share content, they can mute people, remove people, and admit people from the lobby.

Once, you click on Change, the guest user will become an attendee.

Once the user becomes an attendee, you can make them presenter in case you want them to share their screen. Click on … and then Make a presenter like below:

Once you make someone Presenter, then only the user can share the screen.

This is how the guest users attendees looks like below:

Read You don’t have permission to create private meetings error in Microsoft Teams

Invite guest user to Microsoft teams meetings

Let us see another approach to invite guest users to Microsoft teams meetings. Open the teams meetings that you have created, then Right click on “Join Microsoft Teams Meeting” and then Copy Link.

That is a big URL and you can email to any users. Basically, any user having that link can join the teams meeting from a browser.

If you open the link in any browser, you can see the see the below screen, from where you can join the meeting as a guest user.

If you are new to Microsoft teams, then you might be wondering how external guest users can participate in Microsoft teams meetings? Or how to invite an external user to Microsoft teams meeting? Here, we discuss two ways we can invite guest users to Microsoft teams meetings. We also saw how to enable Anonymous users can join a meeting in Microsoft Teams Admin center.