Shared Channels in Microsoft Teams. Yet another way to share.

Collaborating with users outside your organization is really straightforward in Microsoft Teams as are the range of security and compliance features available in the platform to help make such collaboration seamless while enforcing your company's policies to keep your data safe.

Shared Channels add a new and powerful, albeit potentially confusing, option to help channel based collaboration work across groups of users who are outside of the membership of the team in which the channel resides. For internal users, channels from one team can share to another. However, for users outside your organization it works entirely differently to the existing guest user access we are familiar with - in ways that may be of benefit or be detrimental depending on the specific needs of the organization.

For those who are familiar with Private Channels, the management of Shared Channels will not have much of a learning curve. In many important ways a Shared Channel is far more similar to a Private Channel than it is to a regular channel, in that it has its own membership, excludes by default access by other members of the parent Team, and has its own SharePoint site collection backing it up for storage of files.

Providing access to users outside your organization requires a different set-up in Azure Active Directory (AAD) versus the guest user access you may be used to. Whereas guest users are non-member users within your AAD instance, where they behave like any other user, external users who have access to Shared Channels must be part of trusted tenants with federated access through their own AAD. This has certain benefits in terms of the user experience for the external user, but, potentially, certain downsides when it comes to the granular visibility of who outside your organization resources have been shared with. 

So, for the external user, what is the difference? Right now as a guest user who is a member of a Team in  a non-home tenant, you must connect with Teams to that tenant and authenticate there before you can access the Teams content. With Shared Channels, the content appears in your "home" Teams meaning that you no longer have to switch between tenants as a guest. Process-wise this would seem to have upsides and downsides. Sure, it makes the experience a lot of seamless; but do you really want such a seamless mechanism for stepping outside of the walled garden of your own company? Every organization might view this slightly differently, but while this new feature creates a lot of potential, it may not be for everyone.

There are lots of ways I have seen users organize files or other resources in Teams which Shared Channels has the potential "break" from a purely practical "what should intuitively happen if I do x" kind of perspective. The biggest issue I see is that the intent of a Private Channel in cutting off access to all but a subset of the parent Team is intuitively clear, but the same behavior in Shared Channels (which implies shared more widely, not locked down more) is less so. Shared Channels creates yet another place where your stuff resides, with the added complexity of managing access to which this brings about.

And while on the individual shared channel basis, Shared Channels would appear to create a much more seamless experience for the end user, this really wouldn't be the case if they happen to collaborate with multiple different organizations who each approaches this sort of sharing differently. At least with Guest Access it is 100% clear what process you must follow to collaborate in organizations where you are a guest, but with the addition of Shared Channels,  with some of your partners your "guest" access might appear in your "home" Teams, and for others you might still be switching between tenants. Ultimately, which experience you get isn't entirely up to your organization as the Shared Channel federation is a two-way trust, meaning your partner organizations also need to opt-in to this feature for it to work.

Increasingly Teams offers several different and often contradictory ways of achieving much the same end result - Shared Channels can be added to this list. While each of these features is individually useful and powerful, together, without clear planning and rollout management, they can become confusing. For organizations, understanding the differences between features such as external access, guest access, and the federation behind Shared Channels, is important to make the right decisions to achieve your users' objectives.

For now Shared Channels remains in public preview. If you are a Teams admin and this is of interest for your organization then it might be worth starting the process of understanding and testing this facility.

More information:

• Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels is rolling out to public preview - Microsoft Tech Community

• Shared channels in Microsoft Teams (Preview) - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

Title image credit: Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash