Sometimes one might encounter situation where the Join or create teams view does not show anything else but creating new team or joining by code boxes. This view should show all public teams but missing these can be caused by couple reasons.
A while back fixed this in our company’s own environment by disabling ” Scope directory search using an Exchange address book policy” switch from Teams admin. Fixing this has been described for example in here: https://cann0nf0dder.wordpress.com/2019/10/15/unable-to-see-public-teams-within-join-or-create-a-team-section-of-ms-teams/
Now I experienced this with customer’s pretty new tenant (created 2021) and the scoping was not enabled at all. Searching the webs did not give any further insight to this but in the end it was figured out that this issue is caused by user missing Exchange Online. This customer is still running Exchange in on-premise which has been root of quite a few issues when working with Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.
Thus until users move to Exchange Online they can’t see public teams in the Join team view but can search by name. Though it has its limitations as search is not “contains” but more of “begins with” kind. Searching for a team with word in the middle of name does not return the team so one needs to know how the team’s name starts. This is a bit problematic when there are for example fixed department abbreviations used in team prefix.
So, did not find this information from other blogs so decided to write it out if someone else happens to have this puzzle at their hands 🙂