Non-team member and guest ability to use chat in a channel meeting
When hosting a meeting in a Teams Channel, non-team members from within my organization and external guests from outside the organization can't view or type in the meeting chat. It's fantastic that we can host meetings in our Teams Channels so that the chat remains for us to reference later in the Channel. It would be even better, if all individuals (team members, in organization non-team members, and external guests) invited to the Channel Meeting could participate in the Meeting Chat.

9 comments
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Anonymous commented
We want to use Microsoft Forms for surveying our students and guests about the topic to inform our discussions during the meeting. Not having the chat as a place to add the links to the Forms is frustrating and a waste of time if we have to email them to participants. We also lose the record of those links within the recurring meeting. Please add this feature ASAP.
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AnyName NoOne Cares commented
Serious design oversight. Organizations want to centralize work in one location for all related chat, files, recordings, etc. so Teams groups and channels is a natural selection. But sometimes those meetings happen ad-hoc and resources outside the Team members need to be included. Then those outside resources can't use chat in a meeting they are invited to because it's started from within a Teams group or channel. You can add them as a member but permissions updates can take any length of time so maybe a couple of minutes or maybe they can't view the chat until hours later. And then that meeting resource has visibility to everything shared in the group. And it creates "noise" they don't want. It's dumb. Chat is a basic core functionality to any online meeting. Poor forethought and poor design.
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Anonymous commented
PLEASE add this feature!
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Anonymous commented
I work as a student assistant to the career counselors at our university. Part of our job is to present powerpoints about career development to classes, which we've adapted to doing virtually through Teams. We use the groupchat function within the meeting to check students' comprehension of topics discussed (i.e. Are you comfortable writing a cover letter on your own?, Do you want more detail about networking?, etc.). However, I've heard several friends and fellow staff members say that as guests in that professor's class, we can't see the chat to know how students feel about material, which makes it harder to figure out how to tailor a presentation to students' needs.
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Sarah commented
Yes please!
My staff and I are regularly invited to present in classes (which have their own Teams) and because we're not enrolled in the class, we're not a member of the Team and therefore cannot see the chat - which makes facilitating an engaging presentation way more difficult than need be - we can't use polls, engage feedback, collect questions - it's such a bummer.
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Anonymous commented
This is very much needed. I'm hosting an event and needed to have it be in our Team channel but n ow none of the attendees will be able to use the chat function since they are not part of that Team. This happens way to much and seems like it should be a simple thing.
Deborah
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Paul commented
Specifically for guests from external organisations this is another case of a tenant centric approach by Microsoft instead of team based approach. This is Micosoft TEAMS and teams regularly have full members outside the Tenant.
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Varshi Gupta commented
Yes! This is a great to have feature teams lacks right now esp considering everything is virtual and we need more online collaboration with external members than ever before.
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Anonymous commented
agreed this is much needed, also see my other post about the bug that we seem to have found with how this works generally