External Teams Chat – Voice and Video Not Available
I wanted to look and see the options for the Voice/Video buttons in a Microsoft Teams chat, and why sometimes I do not have these available based on who I add to the chat
I see these combinations:
Internal User
The single user can be reached via chat, voice, video or screen sharing and the drop down arrow next to the call button allows me to ring their non-Teams numbers (mobile etc.) as I have a Teams Voice license
Internal Users (more than one)
No option to multi-party call them on their phones, just multi-party via Teams with voice or video and chat keeps working
External User
One external user, can do voice and video and chat. Now see the External message
Multi-Party including External User(s)
Not able to do voice or video once I add one (or more) external users, note that this does not include guest users. Screen sharing is also disabled (upwards pointing arrow) but chat keeps working
Guest Users
This is to the guest account and not the users external account in their own tenant, they need to be signed into the target tenant as a guest to receive this call (i.e. they are an internal object in your AAD and signed into that). External flag is not displayed. The word “(GUEST)” is appended to their display name elsewhere on the Teams app
Meet Now
Found in the calendar. This sets up a meeting (rather than multi-party chat) and the Meet Now option gives you a URL which you could paste into the chat and move the chat to a meeting. Chat in the meeting is separate from the multi-party chat you might previously have held. The default Meeting Options allow anonymous meetings, so the parties do not sign into the meeting so their display name is their name in their source tenant
There are other combinations to these where the Teams admin has specifically disabled certain options such as guests and federated chat. The above is the default behaviour noted at the time of writing in October 2021
One response to “External Teams Chat – Voice and Video Not Available”
Kristjan
About the part “Multi-Party including External User(s)”.
Is there a way to enable this?
I’m offten in the situation chatting with two or more external attendies and the chat extends to the point where we want to take a phone call (the group of 3-4 people). But that is not possible because of the grayed out call button. I know I can create a meeting and make the call that way, but it is often too much of a hastle.
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