
With allowed domains, you are forgoing the abilities of Open Federation and are instead saying “ONLY these specific domains are allowed.” In this stricter method, your users can only chat with users from your domain and the specific partners you have selected.

View or set an Out of Office message / Status message.Participate in a Group chat (i.e., External Access is one to one chat ONLY so no starting a 1:1 and then adding someone).Share files (remember, shared chat files go in the sharer’s OneDrive, and External Access does not enable a OneDrive, so there is nowhere to store the file).Search the user directory (excepting for email addresses and using Direct Routing/SIP).View files shared with them in chat messages.Chat with users within your environment.With Microsoft 365, however, that “plumbing” has already been taken care of if you have External Access on, you have federation. In the Skype for Business days, “federated” meant you had taken specific action to connect to another domain. GET OUR NEWSLETTER: Subscribe here for weekly content from AvePoint Why? Because users of another system (or tenant) are being granted access to your tenant. This is often deemed Federated access as well. Okay, a little more detail on External Access. External Access is your friendly neighbor, Wilson, able to talk with you over the fence but not able to get inside your yard. External access simply allows people from outside your organization to talk with people from inside your organization.

It does not relate to your Teams and Channel conversations nor files. The terribly named External Access is a holdover from Skype for Business, but with no additional information. This is the most commonly used phrase for sharing with outside users-and it’s the least correct. There are two ways of sharing content with Microsoft Teams external users: And this, frankly, is why another article is needed. I mean, external sharing is part of this, but it’s not all of it.
