Shared channels in Microsoft Teams are a great way to expand your team into newer areas within your organization. This new feature allows for more flexibility, and a common communications platform for everyone involved.
This article will explore the benefits of using shared channels, which are excellent for engaging with outside contacts. In particular, you can share channels with other teams, partners and vendors. Unlike dedicated channels, shared ones act more like browser tabs and messaging windows do in other apps. Installation is quick and easy!
Microsoft Teams shared channels are private conversations that can be joined by anyone with the link. For example, you would share an email conversation or an instant message conversation with a colleague or partner.
Good way to be on the look out for new changes and additions to Premise.
Microsoft Teams has a great feature that enables multiple people to have access to the same channel and improve customer engagement.
Some limitations on shared channels
Microsoft Teams is a really useful tool if you’re managing a team with lots of people. We’ll go over how to set it up and work effectively with their shared channels.
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Managing shared channels.
In conclusion,
Microsoft Teams are shared channels to share and collaborate with others on conversations.
Microsoft Teams is an excellent platform for collaboration. You can use shared channels to track your progress as a team and keep everything organized. Channels are where anyone from your organization or external partners can post content and access the resources without being added to the list of team members.
Microsoft Teams offers channel options to help you create different types of collaboration. Your organization can use these channels for projects and departments, among other things.
There are a couple different types of channels you can create for your team. A standard channel is the most popular, and it’s the version others on your team will see. You can use this one to post messages, edit content, and interact with apps like Microsoft Planner. Moreover, a standard channel does not create a separate SharePoint site; it’s public to all members of your team.
Private channels have their own unique set of rules. They’re a good way to stay up-to-date on things in your specific industry as well as with your colleagues when it comes to daily, individual updates.
When you create a private site collection, only members with permission to see the content will be able to access it. Members that are not invited won’t have access to the entire site and any of its content.
If you want to share your channel content to a wide variety of people, Shared Channels is the way to go. With this feature, you can invite anyone who’s not an affiliate or part of the team to view and access the content on your channel. This is a more modern alternative to restricting team members from accessing their own channel contents.
Sharing channel access on external users’ Teams accounts is a simple way to collaborate with employees outside of the company while staying connected to their current tenant.
To do this, shared channels use Azure Active Directory B2B direct connect, which allows you to establish an agreement for seamless collaboration between two Azure AD organizations. Your users will be able to interact with external Azure AD organizations, and you will be able to control how they collaborate with them. You can grant or restrict their access as needed.
What are the obvious benefits of Microsoft Teams shared channels?
Shared channels are great way to collaborate with people outside of your team. They’re secure and seamless, so you don’t have to worry about setting up a meeting space or having an invite. It works straight away, it just requires an account.
One of the great things about shared channels is that they allow external users to access just one channel while you’re still collaborating with your own team. This prevents sprawl within your organisation, helps streamline collaboration between teams, and prevents the risk of oversharing sensitive information. If you’re working with teams that frequently collaborate, sharing the entire team can be isn’t always ideal. But if you have channels that contain confidential information, it’s better to share channels instead of individual employees.
When you share channels with external users, you can avoid the need to switch tenants or sign in with a different account. This makes it easier to get access to and view your content from another perspective.
In terms of compliance, a shared channel’s data belongs to the host tenant. Only the host tenant’s data policy can decide what happens with that shared channel’s data. Shared channel data will be subject to whatever protections are agreed upon with the host, as well as any other applicable policies and sensitivity labels. Of course, our Data Loss Prevention (DLP) features, retention policies, and communication compliance features are all supported.
With shared channels, you can create amazing teams of content creators.
Some of your Microsoft apps are not supported in shared channels, including Microsoft Stream and Microsoft Planner.
Notifications are private and include missed activity emails. You can have a maximum of 50 shared channels in a single team. However, unlike private channels, shared channels don’t support the Meet Now feature, meaning you can’t schedule ad hoc meetings.
Here is a guide on how to use Microsoft Teams shared channels!
If you want to share something with your team about Microsoft Teams, you’ll need to first log into your account and create the shared channel there.
Teams will allow you to choose a new channel name and be able to customize the privacy level. In order to create a shared channel, you’ll need to select “Shared” from the drop-down menu.
Adding a new shared channel in Microsoft Teams
Figure 1: Add the Shared Channel Microsoft Teams to your own channel
To invite team members to a new shared channel, go to the next page by typing their name.
The new channel will appear in the team with a shared team icon, making it easy for different members or managers to communicate with one another.
Microsoft Teams’ Shared Channel icon
What can it do?
If you have existing standard or private channels, it is not possible to turn them into shared ones. Any new channels will need to be created from the ground up.
With a shared channel, you’ll have complete control over who can share the channel. You can choose to invite your team or specific people and they will receive an invitation. They have the option to accept or reject the invitations on their team’s behalf.
Sharing a shared channel with other users
Figure 3: Share a shared channel with others in Teams
Community management can be difficult and frustrating.
Teams kicks off a whole new collaboration system with Office 365. SharePoint, collaboration sites, and group mailboxes for your teams are all included in the box!
SharePoint Online offers a separate site for files shared through shared channels. Those who own or are participating in the channel will be allowed to access the site. If your site administrator has access to the channel, they can derive access to the SharePoint Online site. Documents shared on an external tenant’s SharePoint Online team will adhere to the conditional access controls of that location and inherit any sensitivity labels from the parent company.
For administrators who need to search their dedicated system mailboxes for incoming messages and attachments they receive while they’re designated as the shared channel, they can do so without being limited to a single group’s mailbox during an eDiscovery search.
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Managing shared channels
Admins of Microsoft Teams can manage the access granted to users in their organization by restricting channels and content on the platform. They have control over private and shared channels and you can even set up permissions for individual users.
Microsoft Teams has a global (organization-wide) policy that you can configure depending on your needs. If you want to use the global policy, you can do so here or create your own custom policies. Otherwise, they’ll get the global one set by default.
A Global Teams Policy that’ll turn on Shared Channels in Teams Admin.
Figure 4: Global Teams Policy to turn on shared channels in the Teams Admin Center
Admins may edit global policies or create custom policies, but changes to these policies will not take effect until they have gone through a 24-hour approval process.
You can manage how your shared channels are connected and find hoes to collaborate with in the Teams Admin Center, but you can also do that through PowerShell commands. Graph APIs and PowerShell cmdlets are available to automate this process.
The New-CsTeamsChannelsPolicy command lets you manage features related to the Teams and channels experience. You can also manage:
Who has the permission to create shared channels.
Channel sharing is a feature that allows external users to be invited to a shared channel (‘-AllowChannelSharingToExternalUser’).
These activities are only available for the creators of the channel (-CreateChannel) and their invited users.
Conclusion
“The ability to collaborate with guest accounts (users who do not have a Microsoft account) is a significant step forward,” says the consensus amongst people on Teams. Most Teams users have likely been frustrated by guests being unable to access all channels, while those that are connected often complain about the difficulty and time-consuming process of adding guests.
The new shared channel feature addresses this flaw, making it easier for teams to collaborate on projects with guests without sharing full access privileges of the team or building separate applications for collaboration. Shared channels are a welcome arrival and should be helpful in ensuring that the collaboration process is secure and seamless.
