Nested Teams and subchannels
Could it be possible to create teams within teams. For example, we have a Development Team at our company which consists of two sub-teams, tech support team and project team.
I’d love to be able to have a “home” top-level channel for my project team, and then have sub-channels for each project that we are working on.
Rhys
shared this idea
This request has been reviewed and declined by the feature team.
You can continue to up vote this topic as well as leave comments. Depending on the ongoing feedback, there is always a chance a topic will be revisited based on user demand.
-Warren
110 comments
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Anonymous
commented
Hierarchical teams with access controlled sub-channels would be a very powerful feature.
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Anonymous
commented
This is a must have! Hopefully this will get included soon
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Stephan Grubbe Sølby
commented
I would be rather nice if you would supply a reason why this idea is declined? We are organized around our customers with several different teams working on these. It would be rather nice to be able to have subteams with different members and office group mails etc.
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Anonymous
commented
I previously commented on how this would give Teams a one-up on Slack... Turns out I was wrong. Slack has this feature as part of their Enterprise-Grid plan. There's no reason Teams shouldn't also work out something similar. Teams has so many other features that are better for enterprise, why not this?
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Sean Ellis
commented
@Juan This is why I suggested that there may actually be two separate requests here.
The first is the hierarchy you describe, where there is a real inheritance of properties from one level to the next.
The second just a way to arrange items in the UI to match the user's mental model.
A similar thing happens with arranging contacts in your phone. Although all contacts are in fact equal, it makes sense to group them as "Family", "Work", etc. solely for ease of use.
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Juan
commented
In my opinion this feature has no sense by Teams concept and design and probably this is the reason why it has been declined:
Teams has been created for a matrix organization model where there is no hierarchy, everybody is linked and the access is open for all.
Subfolders, hierarchy and permissions is the model of functional organizations. Instead of Teams, Office Groups and SharePoint, etc. are perfect for this kind of organizations.
If that is true, to request hierarchy for teams seems to me the same that to request to either SharePoint or Office Groups developers to remove it.
Teams is a great tool if applied in either matrix organizations or departments or... teams.
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Anonymous
commented
This feature is a must-have for my organization. Most companies have hierarchical arrangements of departments and this would allow us to reflect that reality. Without it, many of our members will struggle to understand the organization of teams.
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Samuel Carrier
commented
Some context as to why this feature was declined by the feature team would be appreciated. Based on the comments, there is obviously a huge demand for this. Is the feature team worried that it will turn Teams into an architecture nightmare? Is there a technical challenge behind the implementation that they can't tackle?
Just a flat "no" doesn't really reflect a culture of openess and transparency...
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Sean Ellis
commented
There are two possible requests here.
One is to have actual nested teams, which inherit permissions, etc. from their parents (which would require a hierarchical settings system - a good idea anyway https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/33224782-hierarchical-settings)
The other is simply to allow people to arrange the display of the teams that they have into groups.
The former is more general, but the latter should be much easier to achieve, but requires Microsoft to allow users control over their UI - something which has historically been resisted.
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Anonymous
commented
Subchannels would be awesome for things like bots and connectors so they don't clutter up the main conversation. Most of our channels are organized by project, and with apps and connectors posting things about Planner Tasks, approvals, etc., it can get pretty messy. I agree to not add nested teams, but sub-channels would be a one-up on Slack. Especially if you could manage notifications separately.
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Steve
commented
Honestly, I want the ability to nest my own teams, like at least into folders. Using just "Favorites" and "More" means I have a huge list of Teams. I want to be able to create folders, just like in Outlook where I can sort and manage my channels how they logically make sense to me. I don't want/need someone else to create nested channels, but if I created them just for my own personal use, that would be great. Now I just have two monolithic groups, which isn't helpful to my brain
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Anonymous
commented
I want this. The current Favourites and More split is not enough to allow proper grouping of team oriented activities. Nested Teams, channels would be an elegant solution
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Nik Patel
commented
I am not a big fan of this feature. Please do not implement this. SharePoint sites and subsites nightmare will carry over to Microsoft Teams.
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Mukesh Mishra
commented
I have 30 teams that are part of 1 big team. This feature is must for me to ask question to specific team. This feature is available in flowdock under Groups
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Sean Ellis
commented
My guess as to why this has not been implemented: the underlying data structures representing teams and channels have a fixed relationship to each other.
Assume that a team has some of its own state, plus a list of channels which "belong" to it, and channels do not have their own lists of sub-channels. None of the code which deals with channels will ever have had to deal with sub-channels, so things like permissions, lists of users, etc. will just jump directly to the enclosing team to get them. There's no provision for hierarchy.
This is probably why it's so difficult to add private channels, too. The channels themselves have no concept of user permissions - it's all delegated to the teams.
Adding nested objects would be possible if the access to permissions and management is nicely encapsulated. This is unlikely; developers will deliberately or inadvertently bake those same assumptions into their code. Why put a check_permissions() method on the channel object when all it's going to do is always delegate to the team object? Just call check_permissions() on the team object directly. It's more efficient and much easier to deal with ... until you want to change the assumptions.
That said, the initial assumptions on the shape of people's workspaces are false, at least for a fraction of the users. Some people need more than one level of hierarchy.
I hope that the changes being made to support private channels are also supportive of deeper hierarchy, too.
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Mikael Ljungman
commented
There is no question that sub-channels should be implemented. Why has this been declined?
Not implementing this sounds more like an licensing/pricing viewpoint than a useability standpoint for your users. Ryver does this right so why not microsoft? -
Bo Brøndum
commented
Please reconsider adding Sub-Channels
We would like an explanation for why not this should be added.
Our company has a huge demand for this. -
Karl Dawkins
commented
This would be so beneficial for us in TV.
I have a new show, I create a whole team for the whole project, but then I also would like sub-teams which would create sub-folders in SharePoint for ONLY those Team Members.
Teams is supposed to be for Enterprise but a Head of Production may need access to some 40+ Teams (and Sub-Teams which all need their own dedicated Team at the moment) which is just too much.
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Anonymous
commented
Echoing the comment about use case in enterprise environments -- I would love if nested teams were available and memberships "rolled up" -- I could add my new guy to *my* team and they would immediately gain membership in all of the teams into which my team was nested. As it stands now, I've got to add the new guy to a dozen different team sites … and we've JUST started using Teams. I cannot imagine how cumbersome membership management is going to become.
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Jonathan Dalton
commented
I'm loving using Teams, but as the use cases across the enterprise increase and the number of teams on on grows it's becoming unmanageable without this feature. It will be a barrier to further adoption for me as it's been impossible to keep things organized