Today’s blog post introduces the newly introduced Multi-tenant Organization (MTO) option in Microsoft Teams 2.0, which enhances the user experience when chatting between different departments within the same organization/public notice.
Microsoft says that after upgrading to the new version of the Teams app, users can contact multiple tenants and accounts in side-by-side windows, join a meeting or collaborate in a channel hosted in another tenant and compose chat messages in their own tenant at the same time, as well as receive cross-tenant notifications for all accounts and tenants added to the Teams client.
The new version of Microsoft’s Teams app also brings a new search experience that presents coworkers from different tenants in search results.
A tenant is an instance of Azure AD that holds information about a single organization, including organizational objects such as users, groups, and devices, as well as application registrations such as Microsoft 365 and third-party applications. A tenant also contains access and compliance policies for resources, such as applications registered in a catalogue. Key features provided by tenants include authentication and resource access management.
Multi-tenant organizations are organizations with multiple Azure AD instances. Here are the main reasons why organizations use multiple tenants:
- Groups: Organizations with multiple subsidiaries or business units that operate independently.
- Mergers and Acquisitions: Organizations that merge or acquire companies.
- Divestiture Activities: In a divestiture, an organization splits off part of its business to form a new organization or sells the business to an existing organization.
- Multiple Clouds: Organizations operating in multiple cloud environments need to meet compliance or regulatory requirements.
- Multiple Geographic Boundaries: Organizations need to operate in multiple geographic locations based on residency regulations.
- Test or Transition Tenants: Organizations need to test or transition across multiple tenants before deploying more broadly to a primary tenant.
- Department or Employee-Created Tenants: Departments or employees in the organization create tenants for development, testing, or independent control.
