Public Channels
Public channels will provide an outbound communication window for a team to engage with everyone in their organization. These channels are accessible to everyone within the org, without the need to join.
For instance, we may have a team that is private and deals with network issues. They may want a public channel where they can provide updates to existing issues or answer questions users may have. Otherwise, you may end up with two teams in this instance: a private network team and a public network team.
Tim
shared this idea
20 comments
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RussWeb
commented
+1
Critical.
Teams is not sufficiently flexible to enterprise needs w/o this.
Please. Deliver. This. Fast. -
Tim
commented
Public channels is the opposite concept to private channels, but it is just as reasonable and necessary. If I work with a team that is mostly private and only want to have one public channel, the only option today is to create a public team with its general channel and for example 10 private channels. However, this will create 10 independent sharepoint sites and I have no coherent data storage, cannot link each others documents (as of today) which contradicts the good idea behind private channels.
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Antoni
commented
this and three other items on the Backlog should all be fat Tracked as they would make Teams the ultimate collaboration space with excessive proliferation.
- Channel only members:
- Shared channels across organizations:
- Shared channels within an organization
- Public channels: -
Anonymous
commented
I like the support announcement use case. We have support channels for the technical teams and it would be a good feature to have a public channel. Together with the channel moderation feature it would provide a controlled outlet to the organization.
This might make Yammer somewhat obsolete. -
R
commented
Would also like the option to make channels Public, but with a defined access list. In other words, it's not restricted to official team members, but not open to the whole organization necessarily. Ideally you could have both options: 1 accessible by entire org, 2 accessible by an owner-defined access list. Without this type of functionality, we will be forced to configure teams in an odd way. For example, instead of making a Teams site for a project team where we can define a core team, and then secondary contributors, we'll need to make a Teams site for each functional group, or multiple Teams sites for functional group based on primary team members or secondary contributors, this will be too confusing, and we'll probably just reduce the amount of information that flows through Teams.
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Anonymous
commented
Would be interesting to see how yammer is positioned versus such an open channel ...
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Dylan
commented
I would find this very helpful in getting Teams implemented better across the organisation
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John Lucenta
commented
I can think of so many use cases that we would implement immediately when this feature is released. Especially coupled with Tabs/Apps enabled in the public channel. This would be a very powerful feature.
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Rosa D. Brown
commented
We need this functionality. Hopefully, we will get this real soon.
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Brian Critchlow
commented
User rights restriction is key to this feature though. You dont want every employee to be able to post to the public channel without manager approval, etc.
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Brian Critchlow
commented
This would be another great asset to send out emergency messaging to all employees.
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L. Günther
commented
I understand the need, e.g. we do not use Yammer to not have just another tool on top.
I would help reduce the huge number of teams we have. But I think the channel presentation and navigation needs to be improved compared to today. -
Ian Caldwell
commented
+1 for flexibility - but this may not be the best option - sometimes Yammer, sometimes SharePoint - I don't know if a public channel for updates makes so much sense, wrong tool.
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George McRobbie
commented
Is this not ultimately what Yammer is for?
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Anonymous
commented
That would be very helpful. Please implement
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Dion
commented
Can what is suggested here link into groups like yammer, twitter etc.(that organizations already use)? Maybe this could be the launching pad to other media feeds.
I agree this would be a great public facing media feed for an organisation.
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MrMan
commented
Definitely must have public channels for a organization and read only ones while your at it
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El3Max
commented
Yes this is a must
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J Tenneson
commented
We've only been using teams for a month and I already have encountered multiple cases where this functionality would be highly valuable.
Use case 1: Cross LOB Communication
We have a team for an API project. Most of the work is internal and would be noise to anyone 'listening in'. So making the entire team public is too much 'noise' for anyone following. However if 1 channel was made public, then interested parties could join that channel and have relevant cross-LOB communication in that channel, while most of the nuts and bolts (which is noise to them) is invisible.
As a Product Manager I want to create a channel that allows technical collaboration between LOBs without exposing external teams to all the nuts and bolts of what is needed.
Use Case 2: Limiting Access to Sales/Marketing/Account Execs/Others who take a little bit of information and run crazy with it.
I don't want to give Sales/Marketing/etc access to the development team, because they'll ask if something is 'possible', not if it's 'practical' (you know, that whole, given enough time, resources, and funding, virtually anything is possible).
As a Product Manager I want to be able to invite external stakeholders to a specific channel of a team to concentrate conversation inside of 1 team without giving them access to all the making of the sausage.
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Jamey Steinmann
commented
This seems counter intuitive to the purpose of a private team. I think this would be better solved by existing feature requests which are asking for the ability to configure channel permissions and make them available for a subset of team members.