Not to be confused with Atlas Connect, which since Atlas 2.1 has changed name to Atlas ConneX, Microsoft Teams Connect has been announced at Microsoft Inspire 2021 conference to help organisations collaborate seamlessly with customers, partners, suppliers or other external parties through shared channels.
Microsoft Teams Connect leverages the deep collaboration capabilities that Teams brings together, such as chat, meetings, app collaboration and real-time document co-authoring, all while maintaining control over how users access data and information.
In summary, Microsoft Teams Connect allows you to share channels with anyone, internal or external to your organisation. The shared channel will appear within an individual’s primary Microsoft Teams tenant alongside other teams and channels, making it easy for everyone to access it in their flow of work. Admins have access to granular controls, allowing their organisation to stay in control of how external users access data and information.
ClearPeople has been advocating more investments in cross-organisational collaboration and this latest improvement from Microsoft is great news. We believe that online collaboration – including collaboration between organisations - has to be a top priority for companies aiming to adapt, evolve and thrive in a world that requires more agility and resilience than ever before. The Atlas Extranet solutions leverages the power of Microsoft 365 and Teams to transform the way teams work and communicate with customers, partners and suppliers.
The biggest issue and concerns with external collaboration is setup and security. Microsoft Teams Connect will provide one way of collaborating externally but at the same time open up a number of security concerns for internal IT and compliance team members.
Atlas Extranets includes Atlas Connex, our wizard-driven provisioning tool which enables business users across the organisation to setup collaboration workspaces, backed by a powerful governance framework and delivering a great end user experience internally and externally.
With Atlas Extranets, you can take advantage of all the Atlas features for M365 and Viva to enhance cross-organisational collaboration further through knowledge sharing, delivering fantastic collating relevant information and a great user experience.
Microsoft Teams Connect is available today in private preview and will roll out broadly later this calendar year.
Gabriel is Co-Founder of ClearPeople, responsible for the overall technical and Atlas Intelligent Knowledge Platform vision. He works closely with colleagues at Microsoft on roadmap alignment and innovative Content AI Services programs such as Microsoft Viva Topics and SharePoint Premium (previously known as Syntex). Gabriel was part of Microsoft's partner program for Project Cortex.
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