Trust Indicators in Teams: Transparency or Complexity

“What are these new user icons in Teams?"

Since this new feature to highlight the status of different external users started arriving several weeks back, this is a question I've been asked more than a few times. And now, scheduled to start rolling out to General Availability over the next few months, a lot more Microsoft Teams users are going to have this question.

To make Teams effective in being an easy-to-use communication tool, it is fairly permissive by default, and in many cases that's a good thing. If, for example, you use Teams for sales calls, you probably don't want prospective customers to have to jump through ten hoops before they're able to connect with you.

These new Trust Indicators highlight these different categories of user, communicating visually how much your organizational director and/or Teams knows about the user you're connecting with.

There is a problem with these trust indicators though, and that's that these six different categories of user aren't immediately understandable by probably 90% of Teams users. What is the difference between an "External" user with a checkmark versus one with "Email Verified"? Which is better? Which is safer? They are informative, but are they actionable?

Thankfully, Microsoft has shared documentation that sheds some light on who might get which badge when - though without dealing with thorny issues such as that Guests can still end up being External depending on which directory they have selected to be using Teams through. That resource is linked in the comments.

How should you respond to these badges? Well, if you are seeing people who you collaborate with a lot turning up with unexpected badges, and you want to be sharing sensitive information with them, this might highlight some issues with how you've set up Teams in your organization. So, this might highlight a set-up rather than education issue.

Additionally, some badges will automatically come with Teams useability restrictions. For example, a Guest is only going to get all the Teams capabilities that status confers IF they have jumped through the right hoops to show up badged as a Guest in your chats or meetings.

But beyond this, there are things average users should understand arising from this change. Broadly, this should go hand in hand with your information governance education, and just as your employees probably wouldn't be expected to discuss sensitive issues loudly in a public restaurant, they should probably ensure stakeholders are shown with the right badges before sharing similarly sensitive information in Teams.

This is a great step forward for transparency in Teams, but perhaps highlights a level of complexity that could be reduced. Afterall, one of the greatest barriers to security is unnecessary complexity that gets in the way of people doing their jobs.

First posted on Linkedin on 11/09/2025 -> View Linkedin post here