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Gman2025's avatar
Gman2025
Copper Contributor
Dec 06, 2024

Add EXTERNAL Teams account details to a contact in the GAL

We collaborate a lot with another company who have their own tenant. When we want to message an “external” user in Teams we have not messaged before, we must first search and type in the full email address, then select "(External)" to message them. We also have these same users as contacts in our GAL for email. The problem we have is that when you start searching for the user, the GAL contact comes up first, and users think that this is the correct Teams user account so they select this instead of typing further to bring up the real external account. If they do make it as far as to type out the full email address, then two users show up, one from the GAL and one with "(external)" in it.

This is not a great user experience. We'd like to know if there is a way in which we can import the external user to our GAL, or if we can populate the GAL contact with the Teams attributes of the external user. The end goal is to have a GAL contact which the user can click to message in Teams.

Has anyone come across this before and has a solution?

 

Azure AD
External users
Identity
Microsoft Graph
microsoft teams
  • Kidd_Ip's avatar
    Kidd_Ip
    MVP
    Dec 14, 2024

    Try below to improve your expereince:

     

    • Add External Users to Azure AD: Ensure that the external users are added to your Azure AD as guest users. This way, they will appear in the search results when users look for them in Teams.
    • Update Contact Information: You can manually update the contact information in Azure AD to include the Teams attributes (like Teams phone number) for these external users. This can help users identify the correct contact more easily.
    • Use PowerShell Scripts: You can use PowerShell scripts to automate the process of adding external users to Azure AD and updating their contact information. This can help streamline the process and ensure consistency.
    • Educate Users: Provide guidance to your users on how to differentiate between internal and external contacts in Teams. You can create documentation or training sessions to help them understand the differences.
  • PatrikWennberg's avatar
    PatrikWennberg
    Brass Contributor
    Dec 14, 2024

    As Teams do not use the GAL at all, its an Exchange thing, there is no way to utilize that to populate external contacts in your Teams deployment.

    The lookup for internal contacts is done through Entra, and Teams enabled users, when you type the full email address of an external user, the lookup is done against their tenant.

    AFAIK there is no way to import external contacts in Teams.

     

    /Patrik

     

     

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