Tuesday 19 September 2017

How to specify the display name for a Guest member in Microsoft Teams

Hello Readers.  Hope you're well.

A very quick post this time.  

As you know by now, Microsoft has enabled external Guest access in Teams.  I have a big post here.  Like you, I have been doing a lot of testing with this feature.  It's been live for a week or so and the initial bugs have seemingly been ironed out.  

There seems to be mixed feelings among members of the community about how it works and some thinks about the experience and I'm sure Microsoft is listening.

One of the most annoying features is that when you add a guest to a team in Teams, the display name is the alias of the User Principal Name (UPN) by default.  This is especially annoying when the alias is first name only.  Your guest will be displayed by first name, and in lowercase!  e.g. luke (Guest) has been added.  Really helpful when you know a lot of people with the same first name.  Marginally better when the alias is first.last.  But then you get (in lowercase) luke.skywalker (Guest) has been added.  Worse still when the alias is some random combination of parts of first or last name.  e.g. lskywalker or lukesky.

That is, unless you change it.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  

One is after you send the invite.  You can change the display name in Azure AD in the Office 365 admin portal or in PowerShell (Post coming later).

Or, you can change it before the invite is sent!  Hooray!

Once you've enabled your tenant for Teams Guest access and all that, you can add a member as normal by typing in the email address of the guest.

Once the email address is verified by Teams to be a valid Office 365 Azure AD email address, it will be displayed below.  Click on it.


Now click the little pencil.

Now you can edit the guest information.  Change the display name to whatever you want and click on the tick to make the change.

Once you've accepted the change it will be displayed as you specified, with (Guest) at the end.

Now click Add to add the guest account.

And close to send the invite.

Now when you log into your team and view the members, you'll see the guest you just added has the display name you specified.

You will also see the display name in conversations with the guest.

That's it for now.  


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I hope you found this useful.  Thank you for reading.

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