Microsoft won’t deliver Guest Access for Teams this month, says it remains a “top priority”

Last week, Microsoft released a significant update for its Teams collaboration app, rolling out new classroom experiences for Office 365 Education customers. In addition, several popular cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Box are now supported in Teams, which is great for companies that don’t put all their eggs in the Office 365/OneDrive basket.

Overall, Teams is slowly but surely becoming a solid Slack competitor, even though Slack still has at least one killer feature that Teams has yet support, and this is Guest Access support: for those unfamiliar, Guest Access allows companies to give freelancers or vendors access to teams and channels. To make it even clearer, it’s a key feature to make Teams a viable option for communicating with people outside of your organization.

When Teams became generally available in March, Microsoft announced that external access support would be available in June, though it seems that Microsoft is still working on the much-anticipated feature. As spotted by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, Suphatra Rufo, the Microsoft employee managing the Teams uservoice website posted the following update last week:

We were aiming for June, as we had stated in our GA blog post, but we’re facing some issues so it’s looking like it will be just a tad bit longer (not too long). This is a top priority, so trust me when I say you will have it soon!

Foley is guessing that the Redmond giant could finally announce Guest Access support next month at the Inspire conference in Washington D.C., and it would make sense to announce the feature at the partner-focused event. Let us know in the comments if you think Guest Access support could bring more companies to adopt Microsoft Teams.