Microsoft is today advancing guest account support for Teams. When Microsoft first launched guest account support for Teams, the company only allowed users with Azure AD accounts to be added as guests to a team using the service.

Today, it’s enabling support for any email account with guest accounts. This means you can now add a guest with their Outlook, or even a Gmail account. Setting up guest accounts with a non-Azure AD account is pretty straightforward — once you add a guest, they will get notified through email and they can follow the link to accept your invitation and join your team as a guest. Like the regular guest accounts, you’ll be able to control their permissions easily, too.

The support for all email accounts for guest accounts is important mainly because Microsoft is getting ready to launch a new, freemium version of Teams to take on Slack. Teams has only been available to Office 365 business users to date, but the launch of a freemium version of Teams will allow Microsoft to directly compete with Slack, one of the market’s leading communication tools for businesses that already offers a free version.

Tagged with Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Teams