Introducing guest access for Office 365 Groups

By Christophe Fiessinger as written on blogs.office.com

Sometimes you need to work closely with customers, partners, suppliers or consultants outside of your organization, and you need collaboration tools to make this possible. Today, we are pleased to announce the new guest access feature for Office 365 Groups—the group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365. The new guest access feature gives you the ability to include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group.

We are rolling out guest access functionality in phases. Starting today, group owners can add guests to a group in Outlook on the web. Once added, guests receive a welcome email, are granted access to group files in SharePoint Online, begin receiving email messages and calendar invites sent to the group, and can send messages to the group. They also have automatic access to cloud-based file attachments. Guests have the option to leave the group at any time and visual indicators remind all members of guest participation in the group across all Outlook experiences.

Guest access works for any email accounts including corporate and consumer domains (such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com). If the guest email identity is associated with a Microsoft account (such as Office 365 or Outlook.com accounts, for instance), the user is directed to a sign-in page to identify themselves. If the guest doesn’t have a Microsoft account, they will be directed to a sign-up page to create an account.

Co-Founder Sean Ferrel Talks Mobility and Security on ESPN TV's segment "The American Dream"

President and Co-Founder of Managed Solution, Sean Ferrel, shared his mobility and security insights on ESPN TV's segment "The American Dream" on March 1st at 10:30 AM. In the segment, Ferrel discusses how companies can manage mobile devices and keep data secure.  The Internet of Things (IoT) is making mobility faster and more widespread. Mobile device management is more important now more than ever. With cloud solutions, mobile device management can be simple without compromising any security.