Private and Shared Channels in Teams

Since they were introduced, I've been wary of private channels in Teams as they're often used instead of a properly considered Teams structure, can stifle collaboration, and often require setup in the background to ensure a consistent user experience. However, in specific scenarios and when used correctly they can be an incredibly powerful tool in our Microsoft Teams collaboration armoury.

And we will shortly have a new channel option to complement the existing Standard and Private channels - "Shared channels" (or "Teams Connect shared channels") - currently in Public Preview if you'd like to check them out.

Where standard channels are open to all Members of the Team, and private channels can only be accessed by a subset of the existing Team Members, shared channels can be opened up to people who aren't a Member of the Team, both internal and external. The use cases are endless and these two great blogs explain more:

• Overview of the rollout and external collaboration capabilities of shared channels by the Microsoft Teams team: Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels is rolling out to public preview - Microsoft Tech Community
• Some thought-provoking internal use cases for shared channels from Steven Collier: Shared Channels in Microsoft Teams are much more than external collaboration - Microsoft Tech Community

So what do I have to add to the information that's already out there? Quite simply, a few thoughts and considerations about what's going on in the background when you add a private or shared channel. To ensure a smooth and consistent user experience, it's important that we understand what's going on behind the scenes, and the implications. This is especially true if anyone in your organisation is able to create Teams and the various types of channels (and for information, both can be restricted if required, but this should only be done if you make it quick and easy for users to get the advice, Teams and channels they want).

When you create a new standard channel in a Team, it simply creates a new folder in the SharePoint site which sits behind the Team for managing files. This is what you see when you click on the Files tab at the top of a channel. However, when you create a private or shared channel, they create an entirely new SharePoint site in the background for managing files*.

For administrators, these appear as "Channel sites" under the main Team's site in the SharePoint Admin Center:

If you only ever interact with the Team within Microsoft Teams, you'd probably never notice any differences between the different types of channel. However, there's a couple of important considerations:

1. These additional SharePoint sites do NOT inherit some of the core settings from the parent site. Things like:

• Theme (colour scheme)
• Header (size of header banner and whether the "Follow" button shows)
• Regional settings (how numbers, dates, and time are displayed)
• Any changes you've made to the Document library (Files tab) in the main Team (e.g. adding 'version' or 'file size' columns to the Files view)

This creates an inconsistent user experience unless someone manually updates everything in the background whenever a new private or shared channel is created.

2. Users will have to know to select a different site from the main Team when trying to save Office documents directly to a private or shared channel - not particularly intuitive!

It's only right that users across all organisations should be able to benefit from the great functionality that both private and shared channels can bring when used appropriately and with the necessary understanding to get the most out of them. I therefore hope that this article, along with the embedded links, helps you understand the difference, when they should and shouldn't be used, and how they work in the background.

* There are other technical implications to private and shared channels with blogs going into far more detail, but the purpose of this blog is to give an overview that will be useful to all users.