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Enabling Teams for Education for Google users without an Exchange mailbox

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Many of our customers operate in mixed environments where both O365 and Google solutions are used. Customers in this situation can still benefit from the powerful collaboration and communication tools made available within Microsoft Teams.

The following guide provides details about how administrators can set up Microsoft Teams for Google users without an Exchange mailbox within their environment. Any experience limitations related to this set up are also documented below.

Note

This document assumes that Teams has already been enabled at the tenant level. Click here if you need more information on Getting Started with Teams..

Setting up Microsoft Teams for Google users

Step 1: Create a mail user account through the Exchange Admin Center.

Users do not need to have the Exchange product license enabled in order to use Teams. Instead admins should ensure that users are created as mail users within their Exchange environment. The external email address for these users should be set to their Google email address. This will ensure that email and calendar invites sent via Teams will arrive in their Gmail inbox.

You can do this through the Exchange admin center. Learn more about managing mail users in Exchange.

Step 2: Assign Office 365 and product licenses for the user.

Users who leverage Google services for mail and other capabilities will need to be provisioned with an Office 365 license before they can apply Teams capabilities. Learn more about assigning Office 365 licenses to users..

After a user license is created, ensure that the following product licenses are enabled to ensure core Teams capabilities are functional:

  • Microsoft Teams
  • SharePoint
  • Office 365 Pro Plus

Learn more about managing user access to Teams, including how to manage add-on licensing for Audio Conferencing and Phone System capabilities.

If users desire to use additional services such as Stream, Planner and Forms, then product licenses for these services must also be enabled separately.

Step 3: Make calendar availability information visible between Exchange and Google users.

If you would like to make calendar availability information visible between Exchange and Google users in your environment, you can leverage Google Calendar Interop to do so.

If Google Calendar Interop is not enabled then users will be unable to view the availability of Google calendar users from within Teams.

Step 4: Reduce the number of account names users need to remember.

After following the steps above, users will have separate Google and Office 365 accounts. Using Google credentials directly in Teams is not supported. If you would like to sync your users’ Office 365 and Google accounts to reduce the number of account names a user needs to remember, you can do so through Microsoft Entra Connect or by integrating GSuite with Microsoft Entra ID.

Expected capabilities and limitations

After the setup steps above are taken, Teams capabilities and limitations should be as follows:

Area Feature Enabled Details
User notifications and views
Activity Feed
Yes
N/A

Notifications
Yes
Must be mail-enabled user

Notification Email
No
Notifications emails from both Teams and SharePoint may be blocked by Google due to DMARC policy. In these cases, users will not receive notifications in their Gmail inbox. Learn more about how Exchange and Teams interact.

Presence
Yes

Chat and calling
Private 1.1 chat, call and video call
Yes


Private group chat, call and video call
Yes


File sharing in private chats and calls
Yes
SharePoint license required

Adding tabs in private chats
Yes


Adding contact to a private chat and calls
Yes

Team
Create a team
Yes


Add a member to team
Yes


Add a channel
Yes


Conversation in Channel
Yes


Teams Notifications
Yes


Threaded conversation
Yes


Co-authoring documents within a team
Yes
SharePoint license required

Hiding a team
Yes


Leave a team
Yes


Join team from a code
Yes

Meetings
View “Meetings” tab
No


Create a new meeting
No


Receive a meeting invite from an Exchange user
Yes
Invite subject and Teams meeting join link may appear in unexpected format.

Respond to an invite from an Exchange user (ex. accept, decline, tentative)
Yes


Response from Google user visible to meeting organizer
Yes


See Google user availability within a Teams meeting item
Yes
Google Calendar Interop is required

See Exchange user availability within Google calendar
Yes
Google Calendar Interop is required

Start a meeting within a channel using “Meet now”
Yes


Scheduling a meeting within a channel
No

Assignments
Receive Assignments within a team
Yes


Turn in and manage assignments within a team
Yes


See grading information within a team
Yes

Governance
eDiscovery 1.1 chat
Yes


eDiscovery teams and channel conversations
Yes


Data loss prevention (DLP) in 1.1 chat
Yes


Data loss prevention (DLP) in teams and channel conversations
Yes


Data loss prevention (DLP) in Files
Yes
SharePoint license required