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
Angela Sze
shared this idea
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
2112 comments
Comments are closed-
Terry
commented
Why should we have to have multiple sharepoint sites, groups, etc. created for that? seems excessive to do given enacting limited visibility to a channel shouldn't really be that hard of a task to complete.
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Terry
commented
So you are forcing us to create two+ groups for the same team so that we can silo some folks to each one? seems a bit reducndant and kind of takes away from what the channels could actually do.
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Anonymous
commented
We still need private channels. We don't want a huge number of groups.
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Jennie
commented
This is a functionality that relates to tasking, not just for visibility of a task. This is a critical piece and this work around is not the same as what is being asked
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Anonymous
commented
I like that you added the ability to private a whole team, but I can see it getting confusing having my developers jumping back and forth from one team to another. Information will definitely be put into the wrong team. The way we typically organize in Slack is one team for everyone and anyone from the company can join who would like to see what is happening with our products. Each product has public and private channels. The public channel is used to broadcast information to our product owners and anyone interested in updates of the release. The private channel is for internal team work only (the back and forth conversations that happen while the team is working). Sometimes there are multiple public and private channels for a product if we need break them up into smaller components for the group to work in smaller circles.
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matshe@microsoft.com
commented
I would need to use this more to give very good feedback.
Private channels may still be important. It is way too heavy to create this many private teams on the fly. :( Channels are supposed to be more light way, ways to have a conversation on the fly. Perhaps the encouragement should be towards group chat instead? Though there some might lose needed functionality that a channel has?
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Al Linke
commented
My users asking for this too. Creating additional teams for this need would just clutter things up, not a good way to go.
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Marc Wenning
commented
really need to the ability to create private channels within a team, having to create a new private team seems unnecessary and would add teams that really arent needed when they could just be a private channel.
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Max
commented
The "try this instead" does not meet our needs. It is not useful for us to have to create a new group/Team for every sub-conversation when a private channel in an existing team would be much easier.
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Anonymous
commented
Agreed! This is really holding us back from completely utilising Teams.
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Mstyslav
commented
We at the beginning of preparing a structure of the MS Teams in our organization, and private channels is crucial if we want to avoid needless multiplying of teams.
Provide us with ETA, please -
Sven Dinglinger
commented
Can you estimate when the release will be?
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Diego Anguita
commented
Other feature will be TODO integration... this is very util. Thanks
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Cory Calderon
commented
You should be able to have both open and private channels. Project teams usually consist of people at all levels of the organization (manager, supervisor, specialist, etc.). Some channels should remain private where private conversations, documents and files can be exchanged. For example, a Finance Channel might have people from the finance department sharing budget or compensation information.
You want that conversation happening on a MS Team, but not visible to all people and all stakeholders. If this feature was enabled, it would improve our MS Team adoption rate because employees are fearful that anything and everything is visible to all team members.
We are a company of 500 employees and 14 regional offices. MS Teams is critical, but with a few tweaks it can be our go-to standard for team management.
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Damien
commented
this is a key feature to manage the Teams structure, and prevent a lot of duplicates and inefficiency
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Роман Панковский commented
Very very very neeeeeded!!!!
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Stefan
commented
When initiating a meeting and choosing the channel, user still needs to specify who should be invited (from the team list). By default, all members of the channel should be invited and not all members of the team (since the channel seems to be a subset of the team) and there is no need to bug everyone in the team with channel-specific meetings.
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Cécile MAYER
commented
Hope the release will come soon, this is needed when you have a team with different areas of expertise: communications, administration, technical projects. You don't want to bother everyone with emails they are not concerned with
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Anonymous
commented
Yes please!!!
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CHANDAN ESANAKULA
commented
individual channels should be able to be made public or private closed, in case of private only access on invite from members is allowed.