Standard, private and shared channels in Microsoft Teams

You probably know that Microsoft Teams uses teams and channels to structure information.

• A team is a space for a group of people who work together on a common goal. People may be within a department, across the organisation or even external users.
• A channel is a sub-space within a team created for specific tasks or topics. Channels help you to narrow down conversations, organise files and provide quick access to tools relevant for each task or topic.

Until recently we could only create standard channels so to manage access to files and conversations, we would create separate public or private teams. This approach worked but ultimately led to a proliferation of teams and as a result sub-optimal user experience and governance challenges.

However, now we have three different types of channels to provide the right level of access without the need to create multiple teams. In this article I’ll share what the three types are and when to use which to set up an effective collaboration environment.

Standard

A standard channel is the default type of a channel. You can’t manage members at the channel level but it has advanced features that are not available in the other two types.

Key features:

• Inherits membership from the team.
• Visible to all team members.
• All team members can participate in conversations and access files.
• Guests (people outside of your organisation) can be invited to the team and see the channel.
• Channel meetings can be scheduled.
• Planner, bots and connections can be added to the channel.
• Create up to 200 standard channels per team.

When to use:

• For team-wide communication and collaboration.
• When needing to use Planner, bots, or other cloud services.

Private

This type of a channel lets you create a secure collaboration space for a subgroup of people who are already members of the team.

Key features:

• Inherits membership from the team but lets you invite selected team members to the channel.
• Only invited members can see it.
• Only invited members can participate in conversations and access files.
• Guests (people outside of your organisation) can be invited to the team and to the channel.
• Scheduling of channel meetings is not available.
• Planner, bots and connections are not available.
• Only up to 30 private channels can be created per team.

When to use:

• When a subset of people in a team need a private space to discuss sensitive information (e.g. budgets, resourcing, invoicing).

Shared

This type of channel lets you create a secure collaboration space for team members and non-members. Most importantly, you can share one channel between multiple teams.

Key features:

• Can be shared with a different team.
• Inherits membership from the parent team but also non-members can be added directly to the channel.
• Only invited members can see the channel exists.
• Only invited members can participate in conversations and access files.
• Guests (people outside of your organisation) can be invited directly to the channel.
• Can schedule channel meetings.
• Planner, bots and connections are not available.
• Up to 50 shared channels can be added to or created per team.

When to use:

• When you need to create a collaboration space for a group of people who are all members of different teams but all work on different aspects of the same project.

On a final note

You can’t convert one type of a channel to another, so advanced planning is needed.

Having three different types of channels opens opportunities for creating more flexible and effective collaboration spaces. You can build teams based on a traditional organisation structure while providing workspaces for cross-functional collaboration.

Make sure you take advantage of these three options when planning and building your teams.