Chat

Overview

Instant messaging capabilities are a core part of Teams’ functionality. You can chat with a single person, or a group, sending text messages or audio/video messages. You can also share files, which are stored in OneDrive and only shared with the people in the conversation.

Presence information is pretty important in instant messaging activities since it indicates a user’s current availability and status to other users. It’s generally set automatically based on a user’s activity – showing, for example, when they’re in a meeting or on a call. However, users can manually set their status and override the automatic settings if they want to.

There are also a couple of useful features for more structured group collaboration. A Team (within the Teams product) is a structured workspace for a group of people, such as a project team or department, and provides one place for related conversations, files, and meetings. A Channel is a dedicated section within a Team and acts as a “chat room” to keep conversations organized by specific topics. Shared files, photos, and documents in Channels use storage allocation from SharePoint Online.

External collaboration

If you want to use Teams and collaborate with people outside or your organization then you’re likely to use the External Access or Guest Access features:

• External Access lets you find, call, and chat with people in other organizations that are using Microsoft as an identity provider. It’s enabled by default and means that you can search for and call people in other organizations using their email addresses, and they can do the same to you. You might have heard the term Federation – it’s how the External Access feature was initially referred to
• Guest Access means that external users are added to your organization’s Entra ID and B2B collaboration users using a Guest Account. A guest can be given nearly all the same Teams capabilities as a native Teams member allowing more comprehensive collaboration with internal users

There’s a useful table in the Learn documentation that shows the differences between using External Access and Guest Access.