Microsoft has a bunch of new Teams features coming and is introducing a new category of Teams Intelligent Speaker devices at Ignite this week.
It wouldn’t be a Microsoft event without a slew of Teams announcements. And on Day 1 of Microsoft’s virtual Ignite Spring 2021 event, officials didn’t disappoint. Microsoft announced a new channel-sharing feature coming to Teams broadly later this calendar year. Called Teams Connect, the feature will enable users to share channels with anyone — internal or external — to one’s organization. The shared channel will appear within a user’s primary Teams tenant, alongside other Teams channels. The new Teams Connect feature will be available in private preview starting today. If you’re wondering how Teams Connect compares to Teams Guest Access, it seems that with Guest Access, you can add an external user to your Teams environment, where they become a guest. With Teams Connect shared channels, multiple organizations can share a single channel that all members can then access from their own Teams environments. Channel sharing seems more suited for scenarios where multiple organizations are collaborating together on a specific project. Guest Access seems more suited to situations where an external party needs broad access to organizational data and information, above and beyond the channel.
