This post is about the feature update which enables people to chat from Teams to Teams user no matter if personal or commercial (business) user. It was announced on Ignite 2021 fall edition. On a recent Microsoft Tech Community blog it is emphasized the feature’s availability and the fact the there is no more limiting barrier to securely chat between Teams personal accounts and Teams commercial accounts.
There is not only 1:1 chat available but group chat as well. I.e. you can start chats with more than two people. Furthermore you can decline chat invites and you can send someone up to 10 chat messages but not more without acceptance by the person to whom you are trying to chat to.
What else should we know? Some key aspects of the new feature:
• explicit opt-in / acceptance of chat requests
• external chat risk notification
• external
• pre-chat spam check
• limit of 10 messages before chat request acceptance to proceed chatting
• admin controls to configure (external access) settings on tenant- or user-level
• display the name and email address, but nothing else
• Teams personal users can change their discoverability to opt out from being found by others
What can I configure on Teams Admin Center?
Via TAC you can configure if the feature is on or off in the external access settings under Teams accounts not managed by an organization.
You can even configure that users from Microsoft Teams commercial (based on Microsoft 365 tenant) must initiate a chat and Teams personal users cannot contact Teams users of a Microsoft 365 tenant initially. This means that the chat must be initiated by a Teams commercial user. In order to configure it the grey box must be un-ticked and settings must be saved.
erik365.blog 