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Support for Private Channels

Private channels enable focused private collaboration among a subset of your team. You can find detailed information on the capabilities and management of the private channels feature here - https://docs.microsoft.com/MicrosoftTeams/private-channels. Note: Work to release for the government clouds is in progress.

There are four other types of channel functionality on our backlog that we will continue to track – feel free to upvote and/or comment on the items listed next to each:
- Channel only members: to enable collaboration with people outside the team in a specific channel, without granting them access to the team itself.  The channel member could be someone in your organization, or external to your organization (guest). https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/31374577
- Shared channels within an organization: allow people in different teams to collaborate on a shared project or v-team in the context of their own teams. A channel can be shared across teams in the same organization https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18615565
- Shared channels across organizations: allow people in an organization other than yours to collaborate on a shared project or v-team. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/32987917
- Public channels: to provide an outbound communication window for a team to engage with everyone in an organization. These channels are accessible to everyone in their tenant, without needing to join. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/34154851

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Angela Sze shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
completed  ·  AdminAlex (Teams Engineering, Microsoft Teams) responded  · 

Private channels enable focused private collaboration among a subset of your team. We are super excited to share that this feature is fully rolled out to the public ring. You can find detailed information on the capabilities and management of the private channels feature here – https://docs.microsoft.com/MicrosoftTeams/private-channels.
There are four other types of channel functionality on our backlog – feel free to upvote and/or comment on the UV items listed next to each:
- Channel only members: to enable collaboration with people outside the team in a specific channel, without granting them access to the team itself. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/31374577
- Shared channels within an organization: allow people in different teams to collaborate on a shared project or v-team in the context of their own teams. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18615565
- Shared channels across organizations: allow people in an organization other than yours to collaborate on a shared project or v-team. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/32987917
- Public channels: to provide an outbound communication window for a team to engage with everyone in an organization. These channels are accessible to everyone in their tenant, without needing to join. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/34154851

Thanks – and we hope you love your Private channels experience!

~ Alex & the Teams team

Show previous admin responses (19)

2112 comments

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  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    A sub-channel would be very helpful for me to better organize the project portfolio documentation. e.g. under one channel (program) I would have several other sub-channels (projects). Each sub-channel (project) would contain several tabs, to host project documentation, one pager timelines (powerpoint), smartsheet dashboards and plans, etc...

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I have used channels but can't see how to make them private. Anyone in a channel can see the other channels which I want to avoid?

  • Per Sivertsen commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Issue with a private channel where the only member was the owner. The owner was removed from the team and lost the ownership to the private channel and now we are not able to add a new owner to the private channel.

  • C. Hughes commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Agree with others that this is not a request for private channel. My use cases are very similar to those noted by Anonymous, Rene, Santiago below.

  • Juan Leon commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hi!! In my organization, we have the same idea. Please consider this into your roadmap.

  • Carlos Zamudio commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This is a good idea, we have the same problem in our organization, sometimes a Team is huge and everyone is asking if what we published is related with them or not. Could be good to have the option to select who in the team can participate when you're creating a new channel, per default everybody can see and write in the new channel but who's creating the channel can select a group of people if necessary.

  • Marlo commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I also got this today. Once thing though that I couldn't add to a private channel is the Planner. Is this expected?

  • Preston Parker commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Got it today -- liking it so far, but looks like it's going to be pretty manual.

    1. You get a Site Collection with each Private Channel
    - I see where you're going here, makes it quick to lift/shift, but it doesn't appear it surfaces in the SharePoint Admin Portal?
    2. Looks like the Group that's created doesn't surface in Azure. Are these hidden for a reason? It would be beneficial to surface so we can add dynamic membership to private channels
    3. Careful naming (i.e. the url for the site is /sites/MyTeam-MyPrivateChannel) and without it being surfaced in the SharePoint Admin portal, we can't rename it using the new URL renaming feature.

    Overall, nice to have, but still raises a LOT of manageability questions for an admin standpoint.

  • Peter Ch'en commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Just got it in our tenant, finally!! Thanks Microsoft Teams team for all your hard work on this.

  • Prateek commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hi Alex, are you saying that next week of November 2019 we will have this feature rolled out?

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @Joseph Larkin I suspect this limit is due to two factors: 1) to keep the use to it's intended scope (i.e. to prevent the creation of a single team for an entire company and then breaking it down into hundreds of private channels) and 2) to keep the creation of additional team sites in Sharepoint to a minimum

    Neither of these are actually technical limitations, but more arbitrary controls to keep things on point

  • Joseph Larkin commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    The limitation of 30 private channels per team is really disappointing. I don't understand it. And yes I know it is in addition to the 200 regular channel limit per team.

  • Dean P commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Great news. I take back my previous post, can't wait to finally try this new feature and complete our Office 365 migration

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