You’ll soon be able to add external users to group chats in Teams

Microsoft Teams will soon let you add external users to group chats. The feature should make it much easier to keep people up to date that you work with that aren’t part of your organization. The feature could roll out as soon as this month, according to the Microsoft 365 roadmap, but that’s subject to change.

The ability to communicate with people outside of an organization is quite popular. Teams already lets you chat, call, and have meetings with external people. Its rival Slack also recently rolled out the ability to message people outside of an organization.

In order to use the feature, everyone involved will have to have external access capabilities enabled.

Here’s the feature’s description, as found on the Microsoft 365 roadmap:

With this feature users can create group chats that include people external to their organization using Teams (requires all users to have external access capabilities enabled).

Microsoft delayed the rollout of Shared Channels for Microsoft Teams earlier this year. While people and organizations wait for that to come out, the ability to add external people to group chats could help bridge the gap.