From Chaos to Clarity in Microsoft Teams: Smarter Cross-Company Collaboration (2025)
By Henrik Wigers Larsen
Microsoft Teams is still the go-to collaboration platform for operational teams, both inside and outside the organization. But while internal collaboration often feels seamless, cross-company work can quickly become chaotic.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to structure your Teams environment with intention. This article explains how to manage people and projects separately, and how Shared Channels and AI-powered governance in 2025 make cross-company collaboration both effective and secure.
Separate People Management from Work Collaboration
One of the most common mistakes in Teams is mixing organizational structure with project work. To avoid this, it’s critical to understand what a Team and a Channel are designed for:
- A Team = People who work closely together long-term (e.g., a drilling team, marketing department, or control room operators).
- A Channel = The space where work happens. Files, chat, meetings, and apps are organized by project or topic.
Example:
A drilling team might use one channel per well. A sales team might have one per client.
This structure helps keep ownership clear people belong to Teams, work belongs in Channels.
The Problem: What Happens When You Mix the Two?
Let’s say Marketing wants feedback from Development. You could simply add developers to the marketing Team, but that breaks structure and leads to two major issues:
- Loss of confidentiality – Developers now see all internal marketing channels.
- Access confusion – Marketing ends up managing users they don’t normally oversee.
In short: you’ve blurred the line between people and projects. That’s where things start to unravel.
The Solution: Use Shared Channels (Still the Gold Standard in 2025)
Instead of inviting people into your Team, create a Shared Channel dedicated to the task and share it with a specific person or Team (both internal and external).
Why Shared Channels Work:
- Separation of people- and work management
- “Oversharing” is avoided.
- Each team manages its own people.
- No extra guest accounts or admin headaches.
Bonus: Everyone sees the shared work in the context of their own Team, keeping the user experience consistent.
What About External Partners?
Cross-company collaboration in 2025 is easier than ever, but you still need to configure the right settings.
“Shared Channels allow users from external organizations to work together in Teams without being added as guests using their own credentials and security policies.” – Microsoft Docs, 2025
Here’s how to make it work:
Go to Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure AD)
→ External Identities
→ Cross-tenant access settings
→ Configure Inbound / Outbound B2B Direct Connect.
- Mutual trust required: Both tenants must allow each other for collaboration to work.
- By default, this is disabled, so you must enable it explicitly.
- Authentication policies (e.g., MFA, device compliance) apply – you must allow external policies you trust.
What’s New: AI Agents & Smarter Governance in Teams
In 2025, Microsoft has added AI Agents to Teams. These tools help monitor, summarize, and manage collaboration automatically, especially helpful in Shared Channels.
- Summarize conversations in real time.
- Highlight unresolved action items.
- Provide permission change alerts.
- Suggest who to include based on context.
This can become a game-changer for operational teams working across companies, especially when dealing with high volumes of data and complex decision-making.
Tip: As you adopt AI features in Teams, review your governance policies. Who can activate AI agents? What data can they access? How is it logged?
Bonus: Updates to UI and Channel Experience
- The “Files” tab in Channels is now called “Shared”, combining links and documents in one space.
- Threaded conversations are being introduced in Teams Channels allowing more structured dialogue and easier tracking of replies.
- Teams is migrating private channels to more scalable infrastructure (using group mailboxes), improving compliance and performance.
These UI and backend changes mean your users will see cleaner, faster collaboration spaces, especially when working across Teams or companies.
Summary: Your 2025 Checklist for Cross-Company Teams Collaboration
| Task
|
Status
|
| Separate people management (Teams) from work (Channels) | ✔ |
| Use Shared Channels for inter-team or cross-company work | ✔ |
| Enable B2B Direct Connect in Microsoft Entra | ✔ |
| Allow and trust external authentication (MFA, device compliance) | ✔ |
| Consider Shared Channel limits and capacity planning | ✔ |
| Review governance and AI agent usage policies | ✔ |
Contact us
Want help structuring your Teams environment?
At Epsis, we specialize in helping operational teams build structure, flow, and situational awareness in Microsoft Teams, using proven frameworks and purpose-built solutions like VOC.
Let’s talk about how we can help your team collaborate smarter, internally or across companies.
