Breaking collaboration boundaries with Teams Connect shared channels

This article is part of Behind Teams, a LinkedIn series where I chat with product leaders about new innovations coming to Microsoft Teams. Our goal is to give you a behind-the-scenes view into the problems we aim to solve with our features. Recently, I sat down with Arun Mehta, who leads the chats and channels collaboration experiences team, to talk about Teams Connect shared channels that help you easily collaborate with anyone inside or outside of your organization.?

With more organizations going through digital transformations, are you seeing new patterns of collaboration emerge?

Yes, we are. Digital transformation is inspiring business leaders to reimagine ways in which their organizations can operate more effectively and stay productive. From our research, we're seeing a hyper-expansion of people working together across organizational boundaries. Our customers tell us that now, more than ever, it is important for them to collaborate with their external partners with the same ease and efficiency with which they collaborate within their own companies. And they want to do so in a way that is secure, governable, and in compliance with their organizations’ policies.

What are Teams shared channels? How are they different compared to how we previously connected with external members in our Teams environment?

Channels are where work happens. Our vision is to transform channels to be open and collaborative workspaces where people across teams and organizational boundaries can thrive and work together. With shared channels, we've obsessed about the experience of external collaboration and worked closely with our customers to iterate on a complete end user and admin experience that provides frictionless collaboration across conversations, meetings, documents, and apps. This has taken a lot of work. We went back to the drawing board with our partners in the Azure AD team and across Microsoft to fundamentally rethink the user identity model, the tenant trust model, and the channel membership model. And these innovations make flexible collaboration experiences such as shared channels possible. With shared channels, users can work with their external partners without requiring them to switch tenants or be added as guests to an entire team. Now people across many companies can easily collaborate as one extended team.

Can you help me understand how Teams ensures that shared channels meet organizations’ security policies?

Shared channels are built on Microsoft enterprise-grade security and compliance infrastructure. We are providing IT administrators with the suite of tools they need to create a secure, governable, and compliant environment for collaborating with their external partners. For example, IP administrators can configure allow-deny lists at a tenant, group, or user level to scope external collaboration to suit their unique requirements. Administrators can audit the shared channels hosted on their tenancy and manage them fully. Shared channels also support a rich collection of information protection capabilities such as e-discovery legal hold, information barriers, retention, and DLP. And speaking of document collaboration, administrators can use conditional access policies to provide a secure document collaboration experience in the shared channels. There are many more controls supported, and I encourage our viewers to refer to our public documentation to learn more.

Could you walk us through a use case?

There are many use cases across sales, customer service and support, marketing, and operations where shared channels can be hugely beneficial. Let’s take the supply chain, for example. A supply chain manager can set up a shared channel and bring everyone across their company and their vendors, distributors, delivery partners, and others as one extended team in a shared channel. Imagine there's an issue that disrupts your supply chain. Because you and all your external partners are in the same shared channel, you can get to work right away to troubleshoot the issue with your partners. You can chat with them in real time to get the details you need and get on a Teams call or a scheduled meeting to discuss a mitigation plan and next steps. You also can use apps, such as Microsoft Lists, to assign tasks and easily put your mitigation plan in motion. For anyone who can't join a particular meeting, they can easily catch up by accessing the recordings or looking at the chat history. The possibilities are endless.

As a marketer, I'm excited to use shared channels with our external agencies that we regularly work with. What does the future of external collaboration look like?

The pandemic has significantly changed people's perspectives on work. As we all know, the future of work is clearly hybrid, where people want the flexibility of working remotely, but they also want the convenience that comes with working in the office. For example, serendipitous interactions with your colleagues. People want to feel connected with their coworkers; they want a sense of belonging. And we can help our users thrive with hybrid work by bringing together synchronous and asynchronous collaboration tools so that people can stay connected and productive regardless of where they're working from, when they are working, and what time zone they are in. As for external collaboration, we will extend the ease of shared channels to support collaborating with anyone with a Microsoft account, so you can collaborate easily with anyone in your external networks regardless of what identity we are using.

?How do our customers get access to Teams Connect shared channels?

Teams Connect shared channels are in public preview. For our customers who already are enrolled in a public preview program, I invite them to try shared channels and provide their feedback. And for our customers who are not enrolled in a public preview program, I encourage them to go to the Teams admin center and sign up for our public preview program.