Teams Guest Users: Privacy Concerns

Access to a Team's public Channels

A guest user will have access to all the public Channels within the Team(s) they are assigned to. If there is information within any public Channels that you don't want to share with a guest, we highly recommend creating a separate Team that guests can have access to.

A guest user will NOT be able to see any private Channels that they have not been invited to.

EXAMPLE TIP: You could create a general "Guest Access" Team so staff who are members of that Team are aware that third parties have access to that information. From there, if you have multiple third parties working on multiple projects, but you don't want them to see each others' work, you can create Private Channels per project within your "Guest Access" Team, and assign Guest Users access to those Private Channels accordingly. 

Access to documents and other files

(A primer on Teams and SharePoint structures is coming soon!)

A guest user will also have access to the SharePoint site homepage associated with a Team. They will NOT be able to navigate to a sub-site (aka the SharePoint site associated with a Channel) that they don't have access to, UNLESS there is a document located within that sub-site's document library that was shared with the guest user. In that case, the guest user can only see that document within the sub-site's document library, and can view nothing else within the sub-site. 

A guest user will not be able to view any documents they do not have access to. 

EXAMPLE TIP:

• Let's say Coriander and Rosemary are guest users for the Spice Team. Within the Spice Team, there is a public Channel called "Public" and a private Channel called "Private". Coriander is a member of the Private Channel, but Rosemary is not. Rosemary will NOT see the Private Channel when they sign into the Teams desktop or web app.
• If Coriander creates a document within the Private Channel's document library, Rosemary will NOT be able to see it UNLESS the document is shared with Rosemary. If the document is shared with Rosemary, they will be able to see a SharePoint library containing that document, but Rosemary will NOT be able to see any other documents within that document library that they don't have access to. Rosemary does NOT have access to the Private Channel, and so they do NOT have access to the Private Channel's document library (except for the specific documents they were granted access to).