Channel only members & guests
Channel only members 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).
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This item remains on the backlog for now. Thanks!
467 comments
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Osman Sharif
commented
Not having this feature greatly limits the use of private channels
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Rob
commented
Definitely need this sooner rather than later. I was forced to give a user access to a whole Team and all its channels. This is a security concern with the user having access to resources they shouldn't have. Such permission issue should not be allowed on Teams and leaves organizations without options to protect data. With the number of votes it is surprising this critical feature is on the backlog. It is hard to understand how other features in development such as Teams dynamic view, video filters, chat bubbles, are more important than this.
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do
commented
Not having this feature severely limits the use of Teams. We switched from slack and because of this one feature, we are considering going back.
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Alexia
commented
I feel like this functionality is ESSENTIAL when collaborating with people external to the organisation (which we do on a regular basis). Yes, you can add external guests to a private channel but they can still see the public channels. Being able to add guests to one channel only would solve a lot of internal issues!
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Ross
commented
There is definitely a need to invite guests to a specific channel. The only other alternative is to create a new team for that channel. This is the kind of duplication and inefficiency we are trying to avoid by including Teams in our organisation.
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Anonymous
commented
This would be very useful in my organisation, I hope MS can add this feature soon.
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Andreas
commented
I also need the possibility to invite a different Person, into one Channel, who is not member of the Team. The Team has got more than 7 Channels (permanent). In my opinion this is a very important - missing - feature. It would be a pleasure to use it soon. :-) Thank you Andreas
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John Taylor
commented
Can you advise when the feature to add a person ONLY to a channel (and not a team) will be realised? I have a need whereby I need to grant access for a user to a channel but I do not want them to have cross-visibility to the rest of the Team. Please advise when this feature will be available or if it is even being worked upon? Thank you, John
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Mikael Holmqvist
commented
What is the status of this feature? It's now been 6 months sins the last Admin post @Alex. We really need this functionality.
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Faraz
commented
I coordinate with over a dozen different external partners, and I want a single team where I can create a dedicated channel for each partner, without those partners (guests) having cross-channel visibility. We currently use Slack and they've nailed this feature. I'm being asked to evaluate Teams as a substitute to Slack, but until we get this feature in Teams, it's difficult to recommend making the switch.
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Anonymous
commented
I need to add an external consult and that's impossible unless he becomes member of our company wide Team.
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Aslam GC
commented
This is a very important feature. Especially as we use channels to gather conversation around particular projects. In a large or matrix structured organization, a project will almost certainly include contributors from outside your "team". Without the ability to create a channel that has specified members who are outside of the "team", we find ourselves without a good solution for how to enable conversation for that project. In some cases, we have created an ad-hoc user chat with those members. This is not ideal because one cannot organize/delete files posted to an ad-hoc chat. In other cases, we have ended up using the chat for the weekly project check-in call as our discussion forum. This is also not ideal and really is using the check-in call chat for much more than it was intended for. Thus we really need the ability to add members/guests to a specific channel that gives them access to all aspects of that channel but not to anything else within the team where that channel sits.
I note that this is a problem that only exists with Teams because of the "team" construct that this program uses which competitors like Slack do not. With Slack you can easily create a project channel with a mix of members to gather discussion around a particular project, and there are no issues with doing this. While I see lots of value in the "team" construct that Teams uses, this use case is an example where having that construct necessitates other features to allow for us to break the construct when the business requirements demand it.
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noddalot
commented
Shared Channels have been announced... coming soon
https://practical365.com/blog/microsoft-teams-connect-shared-channels/
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Amanda
commented
Adding input from a Legal team within a company. We NEED this function. We often collaborate on projects outside of our legal function but within the larger org. We discuss confidential information on our Legal Team site and cannot add members outside of our core team. Even within our core team there are projects that are sensitive in nature and only a few members of the team should have access to. Due to this need for confidentiality, our collaborative projects are parsed out between Team sites and back end SharePoint sites opposed to being centrally located in our Legal team site. Our core team members must navigate to several locations on an average workday causing confusion and reducing efficiency. Essentially an entirely new SP site is being created to house 1 project for a short time, then it is abandoned. If all the members of this Team site were to leave, the historical knowledge of this project would be lost. Having the ability to add a "guest" to a channel (even if the person is within the larger org), would mean that channel would live on in one location for posterity, projects would be more easily accessed by core team members, and overall organization would be improved.
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Gabor
commented
The lack of ability to selectively add team members to channels or the ability to invite external guests to channels is a must for most of the companies.
Hopefully it's not an issue with how the Teams or Sharepoint application architecture was designed that prevents MS from finally rolling this highly demanded feature out? -
Ryan McBride
commented
That would be a huge bonus to collaboration w/out having to muddy the Permissions of Teams
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Nick
commented
Please give us an update on this MS. I think it's safe to say that having it on the backlog and a previous update from September isn't really cutting the mustard with your business users. This lack of functionality is causing issues for organisations who collaborate with external guests. Some idea of when this may be implemented would at least be something.
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Dr. J. Dre.
commented
As someone running several highly active groups that frequently have external collaborators who should only have access to particular subprojects for security, this is an absolutely essential feature that is missing.
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Joel
commented
Last update in September 2020. Any update? We are in the process of switching from WebEx Teams to MS Teams, and being able to do this in WebEx is a huge plus over MS. Like it's literally making our entire setup quite difficult across the company. How is this not implemented yet?
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Søren Riisgaard
commented
This absolutely needs to happen. In our organisation, we work closely together with changing stakeholders from outside the org, and they need to be able to access existing channels, without access to the entire team.