TLC Creative was an early adopter of Microsoft Teams, and we remain a fan today. We love the collaboration it brings to the table, allowing us to work more efficiently and gain feedback more effectively, whether collaborating with our internal team or co-authoring a presentation with clients.

And while Teams is excellently proficient in many areas (file collaboration, chats, meetings, and @mentions…to mention a few), when it comes to inviting clients into your bubble (tenant) or vice versa, this is where things often go awry.

Being positive, Microsoft is continuously improving Teams. In the future, we hope things will “just work” – but it is not at that level of functionality yet (but we are looking ahead to the “Hero Link” process!). Because things do not always work smoothly today, we invested internal TLC time to work through many of the issues and then created a how-to guide to help overcome this “outside tenant” frustration.

We are sharing our internal Teams tutorial to (hopefully) help your clients connect with and collaborate better with you. Full disclosure, we are mostly PC-based when using Teams, so the nuances of Mac Teams are not captured in these steps.

This guide is written under the assumption that you have a Microsoft Teams account and have already created a “New Team” – which is set up as a “Private” Team. Here are our steps to connect an external person to your Teams project, from the perspective of your client:

1. Once the private Team is created, click “Add Member” to generate the email that is sent to each person added to the Team.

2. Instruct your client to use the “Open Microsoft Teams” button in the email they received (Note: the email will come from an automated address: noreply@email.teams.Microsoft.com.).

3. We recommend using the Teams desktop app. The invite email has a button to download and install if needed.

If the Microsoft Teams app is already installed, this pop-up dialog will appear to open with the invite credentials. Click the “Open Microsoft Teams” button.

4. Once Microsoft Teams is open, a pop-up dialog to sign in with an email address is required next. This email address must be the same address that the Teams invite was sent to.

5. Enter the email address (this is the email address of the person being invited to the Team) and click the “Next” button.

6. There may be an additional pop-up asking permission to use Teams. Click “Yes” or “Agree” (after you’ve read and truly do agree, of course).

7. The external person has now been added to the project team!

8. This is the key step! To access the project team, your client needs to change Teams to your company (in this example, it is changing Teams to the TLC Creative connection).

    • In the upper right, click your “Account” button (the circle with your initials inside).

    • From the list of available accounts, select the company that invited you…for example, if you were to receive a Teams invite from TLC Creative Services, you would click on “TLC” in the menu.

    • Then on the left, go to “Teams”
    • Locate the project Team name and click to expand
    • Click “General”
    • Click “Files” at the top of the right side, or “Posts”, and from that dropdown menu select “Files”

9. Your client should now have access to all project files, to open and edit files, upload new files, etc.

10. TIP: To open a PowerPoint presentation (or a Word or Excel doc), Teams has 3 options: PowerPoint for Teams, PowerPoint for Web, and Desktop PowerPoint. Our team uses the full power of the Desktop version. See our earlier blog post on how to open presentations from Teams in the Desktop app: MS Teams – Open in App – The PowerPoint Blog.

Hopefully, this how-to reference minimizes some of the frustrations we encountered with a Microsoft Teams workflow. Wishing you productive collaboration with your clients and excellent results with your presentations!

-Lori @ TLC Creative Services