Support for Private Channels
Looking for the ability to create a channel that only channel members can see. Private channels are available in slack. There is an admin for private channels who is the creator, and they are the ones who add/remove users.
Five types of public/privacy that is being asked for by users:
- Public-Open (visible anywhere including outside the org and anyone can join)
- Public-Invitation (visible anywhere including outside the org, must be invited)
- Company-Open (only visible inside the org and anyone in the org can join; outside the org must be invited)
- Company-Invitation (only visible inside the org, must be invited)
- Secret (invisible to everyone except existing members, must be invited)
Angela Sze
shared this idea
Hey guys, guess who’s back from maternity leave? Your favorite Teams PM, Suphatra! I’ve been back for a few weeks and catching up on where we’re at in Engineering.
Private channels is still actively in development, and I am hoping I’ll be given clearance to share with you some more details. What would be great is if you can post in this thread any specific questions you have about the feature, besides just an inquiry on the release date.
You can also email them to me at sparavi@microsoft.com, as well as any other concerns you might have.
It’s good to be back, and good to be posting on here again. I hope you are all doing well!
Sincerely,
Suphatra
1090 comments
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Dia
commented
Another HUGE benefit for a private channel would also resolve the not so nice way we have to handle moving emails with attachments into a Teams space. We have external clients that cannot have access to our entire space, so they have to send us emails with important attachments. If we had a private channel, couldn't we add them into that? And then we eliminate email entirely? We could communicate with them exclusively in Teams...That would be nice.
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Stephanie
commented
Company-Invitation would be incredibly valuable for our organization. Would it include the opportunity to request to join so the Owner would be alerted? Or would the requestor have to reach out to the owner of the team directly?
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Steven Davidson
commented
another setting that would compliment this well would be the ability to change setting channel per channel, so that on one channel staff cannot edit or change the content,
for example, we have a channel for senior team notices that all staff need to view but do not want them to add to the channel or reply so being able to restrict users from editing would also be a great addition
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Kalle Landelius
commented
To the people crawing Private Channels:
Please reconsider your standpoint. This is only something that will slow the change that needs to happen in companies when it comes to collaboration being communication centric instead of being based around permission silos, as it is today on any file server or in old sharepoint library.Inclusion is the name of the game in Teams and constellations of people in regards to the BUSINESS PURPOSE is the driver, not necessarily the department that you are in. The Private Channel aspect is something that most people want out of laziness or the fact that a lot of Teams roll-out lack proper training efforts for the end users. Use private teams for sensitive information, the channels will not change anything except making a simple, user driven permission model harder to use. "The old way of thinking" in terms of making information inaccessible with overly complex and unscalable models cannot win over making information accessible to the right people through user driven means. This is the future of corporate collaboration, we see it everywhere else and the responsibility has to shift to the owner, project leader or user responsible for creating the team in the first place.
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Allan
commented
Good to hear the feature is coming. I want to echo what others are saying that while it’d be a start, it wouldn’t be enough if the only thing implemented were channels private to only the members of the team. We need something along the lines of the rest of what the original poster requested and/or the ability to control who can see each channel.
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Erica
commented
I want to echo the urgent call for this feature. while the Teams adoption at my company is pretty good, this is the number one feature requested every single time I train a group of employees on using Teams. We are at a critical phase in our roll-out where we need to make structural decisions that hinge on this feature. In addition to a realistic release date, i'd like to know how the Private channels fit into the 365 Group that supports the Team. Will the extra members of the Private channels also be a member of the 365 group? My hope would be "no" so that there is a core membership group that mirrors the 365 group and then these "extra" members that are just part of certain private channels
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Francisco Alfaro
commented
We switched to Microsoft Teams one year ago with the expectation that the Private Channels functionality would be available soon given that it had in active development status since one year before. Another year has gone on and there is still not an update on when this will be available. This is a major showstopper for deploying Teams throughout all the organization here.
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Anonymous
commented
would also be useful if within the channel that one type of permissions could only be limited to uploading documents ... will help it being used as a drop box of sorts for guest members ...
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Johnn
commented
Private channels are available to defined members only.
In Microsoft Teams, press Ctrl+3 to access the Teams view.
You hear: "Teams and channels list." Navigate to the team you want to add a channel to using the Up and Down arrow keys.
Press Spacebar to open the More options menu.
Press the Down arrow key until you hear "Add channel" and press Enter. The Create a channel dialog opens.
Type the channel name and press the Tab key once.
Type an optional team description.
Press the Tab key until you reach the Privacy field. By default, the channel is available to all team members. If you want to set the channel as private, press the Down arrow key until you hear the Private option, and press Enter.
Press the Tab key until you hear "Add" and press Enter to create the channel. The focus moves to the new channel in the content pane.
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Derek
commented
UPDATE!
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Anonymous
commented
With most implementations creating multiple private teams as a workaround to private channels, the ability to add a channel to multiple teams may be something to consider. It would solve the private channel problem while also supporting existing implementations.
It would also create an interesting workflow if the channel could be shared between teams that are in different accounts. We could have a single team for our department with channels linking us to partners and vendors.
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MC
commented
Congratulations with your new baby Suphatra. There's been very limited admin activity on this uservoice system...
So I'm going to be cheeky here since so many are following this conversation, and ask why this conversation hasn't been noticed for 2 YEARS now:
I bet it's hugely popular too (it drives us crazy) so wanted to 'bump' it via this route. Appreciate the attention. Thanks.
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Derek
commented
UPDATE!
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Anonymous
commented
Any Uodate on this?
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Tim
commented
Any update? Just found this online
Create new channels to direct discussions around different themes, subtopics, or tasks to channels of their own. You can create both standard and private channels. Standard channels are open to all team members. Private channels are available to defined members only.
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Anonymous
commented
One of the use cases for us, as a professional services department, is to have a Team that includes all of our consultants, and a specific channel per customer or project. That way I could assign only certain team members to the channel (i.e. only if they are actually assigned to the project). Then they wouldn't be notified about all the other projects that they are not a part of.
The way we are doing it right now is to make a team per project, which is ok in the short run, but as more and more teams are created, they are getting less visible and more difficult to track. A project team with only a few staff members is at the same hierarchical level as the overall 'Services' team, and even the overall 'Company' team, which makes it difficult to sort through the noise. This also means that executives who want access to project information have to become member of MANY teams - i.e. what happens is, they just don't bother using it.
We absolutely want to utilize Teams, and are piloting/rolling it out anyway, but this makes the business case for continuing to use for project management difficult to sell. At this point, we need to evaluate other systems for purchase, which I think would be unfortunate, as I love the integration with everything else O365.
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Jasen G
commented
Without initial support for private channels, many Teams will have been created as a work around. Will there be support to move channels from these Teams (along with all their data) to another channel so we can consolidate our work areas? This will be a critical feature for our Enterprise as whole chunks of the organization restructure their data once private channels are released.
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Pete
commented
UPDATE!
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Derek
commented
UPDATE!
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Christopher
commented
We are currently trying to decide if Teams is the right fit for our company. We love it so far, but the absence of this capability is holding us back from full deployment. We are actually looking to implement Slack as of right now, because they have this capability built in. An ETA on this would be outstanding, since this case has been open for 2 years and we need to implement a solution asap. We'd love to just wait a while longer for Teams, instead of training our staff twice, once for Slack and a second time for Teams.
Thanks