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.

22 comments
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Anonymous commented
We would need that feature because of our agile workflow. So we would like to have the daily standup meetings and other ceremonies as channel meetings in a public channel so everybody could join if interested. Also we manage our Azure DevOps Groups through Active Directory, so if anybody of the org would want to join channel meetings of another team, he would need to join the team. This makes no sense, because at the end everybody would be member in everybodys team.
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Anonymous commented
Isn't this the idea of Yammer? Now with the integration of Yammer into Teams even easier possible IMO.
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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