Microsoft Teams is getting a crucial feature in late-June

Microsoft’s Teams service launched as a preview back in November. The service came out of preview and hit general availability today, launching in 181 markets and 19 languages. Ahead of the general availability, Microsoft added a major set of new features to Teams last week that made the service a lot more powerful. But it’s still missing a really important feature: support for guest accounts.

In a statement to MSPoweruser, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that Redmond is, indeed, working on support for external guest access. With external guest access, users will be able to invite people outside of their organization into their team as a full-fledged member. Details regarding how external guest access on Microsoft Teams will actually work is pretty scarce, but we assume users will be able to configure the permission of guest accounts when inviting them.

Microsoft told us in a statement that the company plans on rolling out the first wave of external guest access in Teams by the end of Q2 2017, which is just around late-June. Here’s the full statement:

“External guest access, gives you the ability to invite people from outside your organization into a team as a full-fledged member.

We expect to deliver the first wave of external guest access in Teams at the end of the 2nd quarter. We already offer guest access in Yammer and Office 365 Groups today and look forward to rolling it out in Teams.”

As a refresher, Microsoft Teams is available to Office 365 Business customers who are subscribed to the Business Essentials, Business Premium, and Enterprise E1, E3 or E5 plans. The service is now enabled by default for all Office 365 business customers using one of those plans, and it’s available on the Web, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

As per usual, we will let you know when Microsoft rolls out support for external guest access in Teams.