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Standard vs Private vs Shared Channels in Microsoft Teams

Miguel Isidoro — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 10:19:52 +0000

This post explains the difference between Standard, Private and Shared Channels in Microsoft Teams.

Introduction

Microsoft Teams is the enterprise messaging solution in the Microsoft 365, allowing for real time collaboration, communication, meeting, file and app sharing and more.

What is a Microsoft Team?

In a simple way, a Team in Microsoft Teams is a collaboration and communication workspace, allowing a set users to chat, hold meetings and share files and apps with its members or a subset of its members. When a team is created in Microsoft Teams, the following is created:

A Team in Microsoft Teams
A SharePoint Site to hold the Teams’s files
A Microsoft 365 Group that manages access to the team
An Exchange Online mailbox
A Shared Calendar

To create a new Team in Microsoft Teams, follow the following steps:

Select Teams in the left navigation and then +

Give the Team a name and description

Add members to the team. In this case, I will add two members, so the Team will have 3 members (the person who creates the Team is automatically added as Owner of the Team).

You can also create a plan in Microsoft Planner that allows you to easily manage team projects and tasks.

Focusing on Microsoft Teams, a Team is composed by channels. It is essentially a way to separate conversations and documents within a Team by topic. For example, in a Project Alpha Team, you can have a General channel (default channel created as part of every team), a Management Channel, a Technical channel, etc. In summary, it is a way to separate topics/conversations and its associated documents. There are the three types of channels in Microsoft Teams:

Standard channels
Private channels
Shared channels

In this post, I will explain what each type of channel and what is the difference between them.

Standard Channels

The first type of channel is called a Standard Channel. There is always a Standard Channel called General created by default in Teams when you create a new Team.

Here is the SharePoint site that was created when the team was created.

Who has access to a Standard Channel?

A Standard Channel is available to all team members.

Where are documents stored in a Standard Channel?

The documents are stored in SharePoint, in a folder inside the “Documents” document library. For each channel, a folder in the “Documents” document library is created and the files are stored inside that folder.

View of the files in a Channel in Teams:

View of the files in SharePoint:

Private Channels

The second type of channel is called a Private Channel. As I said earlier, Standard Channels are accessible by all Team members, making all the information in those channels (chats and documents) accessible to every team member. There are situations, where you want to discuss sensitive information with just a few Team members instead of the whole Team. This is where Private Channels are handy, allows us to have private conversations and store sensitive documents in a secure way.

To create a Private Channel, follow the following steps:

Click on the … near the Team name, and then Add channel.

Give the channel a name select Private in the channel type.

Add members to the channel

NOTE: In Private channels, you can only add users that are already members of the Team.

That’s it. The Private channel is created and is marked with a lock icon.

Who has access to a Private Channel?

Only the Private channel members. The channel is not visible to Team members that are not members of the Private channel. We can only invite users that already members of the team, meaning that if the Team members are Meagan and John, I can only invite them and I cannot invite for instance Peter.

Where are documents stored in a Private Channel?

The documents once again are stored in SharePoint but for Private channels, information is stored in a different site than the Team SharePoint site. This was the solution that Microsoft implemented that was the only that guarantees that only the channel members have access to the information in the channel. To access the SharePoint site, click on Files in the private channel and then Open in SharePoint.

As in a Standard Channel, documents are stored in the “Documents” document library, in the folder with the name of the channel.

Shared Channels

The third type of channels are called Shared Channels and were introduced due to some limitations in Private Channels. In Private Channels, we can only add users who are already members of the Team which is enough for most cases. However, if you want to discuss a topic with just a few Team members and users that are not members of the Team, this is not not possible using Private channels. This is where Shared channels are handy, allows us to have private conversations and store private documents in a secure way with a restricted set of users but allowing us to collaborate with users outside the Team. Before Shared channels, if you had a use case like this, you would have to create a new Team with all the users you want to collaborate and give them access to the Team’s standard channels, associated SharePoint site, Email, Calendar and Planner.

Because all of this, we now have the Shared channel type, which is similar to Private Channels with the possibility of adding members that are not part of Team.

To create a Shared Channel, please follow the following steps:

Click on the … near the Team name, and then Add channel.

Give the channel a name select Shared in the channel type

Add members to the channel

NOTE: In Shared channels, you can add users that are not members of the Team.

That’s it. The Shared channel is created and is marked with a “shared” icon

Who has access to a Shared Channel?

Only the Shared channel members. The channel is not visible to Team members that are not members of the Shared channel. In many ways, the concept is similar to Private channels but with the possibility of adding members outside the Team.

Where are documents stored in a Shared Channel?

For Shared channels, documents are stored in the exact same way documents in a Private channel are stored, in a separate SharePoint site for the same security reasons mentioned for Private channels. To access the SharePoint site, click on Files in the shared channel and then Open in SharePoint.

As in Standard and Private channels, documents are stored in the “Documents” document library, in the folder with the name of the channel.

Standard vs Private vs Shared Channels

Channel Type	Who has access to the Channel?	Where are documents stored?	What Resources do users have access to?
Standard	All team members	In the Team’s associated SharePoint Site.	All resources of a Microsoft 365 Group (Team, SharePoint Site, Email, Calendar, Planner)
Private	Channel members. Channel members must be members of the Team.	In a separate SharePoint Site that is only accessible by the members of the channel.	Team, SharePoint Site
Shared	Channel members. Channel members can be members outside the Team.	In a separate SharePoint Site that is only accessible by the members of the channel.	Team, SharePoint Site

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to develop SPFx solutions, click here.

If you want to learn how you can rename a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you want to learn how to save time time scheduling your meetings, click here.

If you want to learn how to enable Microsoft Teams Attendance List Download, click here.

If you want to learn how to create a dynamic org-wide team in Microsoft Teams with all active employees, click here.

If you want to modernize your SharePoint classic root site to a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you prefer to use the traditional method to update your farm and want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated, click here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from Ignite and some more recent announcements, including Microsoft Search, What’s New to Build a Modern Intranet with SharePoint in Office 365, Deeper Integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and the latest news on SharePoint development, click here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

The post Standard vs Private vs Shared Channels in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Blog IT.

How to Create a Dynamic Team in Microsoft Teams with All Active Employees in Microsoft 365

Miguel Isidoro — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 19:13:03 +0000

This post explains how you can create a dynamic team in Microsoft Teams to have all active employees in your company using Azure AD Group dynamic membership rules.

Introduction

We are living challenging times with the current Covid-19 pandemic crisis and keeping teams together is more important than ever!

Org-wide teams have been around for quite some time, but these are quite inefficient since we don’t have any control on what users are added to the team (service accounts for instance are also added if they have valid licenses assigned to them).

This post explains how you can create a new team in Microsoft Teams containing all active employees in your company based on Azure AD Group dynamic membership rules. Unlike org-wide teams, this approach gives you complete control over what users are added to the team.

The “Team with all employees” scenario makes more sense for small and medium-sized companies. For larger companies, the steps provided in this post can be adapted to create smaller dynamic teams based on Azure AD dynamic membership rules (ex: department teams or any other type of dynamic teams based on valid Azure AD user profile properties).

Pre-Requisites and How-To Steps

Pre-Requisites

The steps described in this post require:

Azure AD Premium P1 license for all users included in the dynamic team
If you are using Active Directory, AD attributes have to be correctly configured and synced to Azure AD to allow the dynamic group to retrieve all active company employees (in our example, we are using the companyName attribute and all users with companyName = “Create IT” will be considered as active employees)

How-To Steps

Now it is time for the fun part! Follow the following steps:

Create a new Team in Microsoft Teams as you would to create a “normal” team. If the team already exists and you want to change an already existing Team to be dynamic, you can skip this step
Go to your Azure Active Directory Admin Center
In Azure Active Directory Admin Center, select “Groups”. This option will allow us to access all Azure AD Groups, that contain teams in Microsoft Teams (group type = “Microsoft 365”)
Select the group you want to edit and set as dynamic. Membership type should be at this time set as “Assigned”, meaning that all members are added manually.
The group details are now shown
Select “Properties” on the left menu and change the membership type to “Dynamic user” and click “Save”
Select “Dynamic membership rules” on the left menu and add an expression that dynamically retrieves the active employees in the company. In our case, the expression is “(user.companyName -eq “Create IT”) and (user.accountEnabled -eq True)”. Click “Save” to save your changes.
The Azure AD Group is now dynamic and users in the group will be retrieved using the expression set in the previous step
Select “Members” in the left menu. Now that the AD Group is dynamic, you will not be able to add or remove members from the group manually.

Testing The Results

To test if the configuration was successful, just follow the following steps:

Add a new user to Active Active Directory, filling the attributes that match the dynamic membership group expression in the Azure AD Group
Force Azure Active Directory to Azure AD synchronization

Everytime new employees are added to Active Directory and synced to Azure AD, a message in the “General” channel in Microsoft Teams will be shown saying that the user has been added to team!