Private Channels in Microsoft Teams

The debate to rule all debates

Tired of this.

Its starting to feel like the voices over on uservoice, all 16, 450 votes for private channels are getting rather annoyed (1440 comments). Microsoft Regional Director Dipti Chhatrapati (Twitter @dips84) recently inquired about the update on whats happening with Private Channels in Teams.

My take on it via an email conversation was as follows:

The start of my mail response

There’s a much larger conversation here. The one of the missing ECM/Content Services methodology/best practice.

And for the most part, Microsoft has tried to augment the messaging with the inner/outer loop strategy. I still believe that from an ECM standpoint, much has to be done in this area.

So lets unpack the obvious:

• Office 365 groups/SCA permissions — This is worrisome when we look at Teams from SharePoint. We have all raised our concerns but in order to fix that, Groups will have to be rewired and that is not going to happen.
• SharePoint IA vs Teams IA — The lines get crossed as both products need to be understood and positioned when building out a quantifiable Knowledge Management strategy for the org. However, this is directly proportional to the ECM maturity and size of the organisation. This includes things like geographical structure, size of departments, if the business has a group structure, etc, etc.
• Enterprise Social — As much as we want to see Teams and Yammer as to separate products, they both promote Working Out Loud. Their difference is traditional ESN UX (Think Facebook) vs Chat based UX (Think Slack)
• The Glue — We all want seamless switching from app to app, without having to authenticate or having another app do weird things and Microsoft is getting it right, but its going to take time
• Compliance — I’m not even going to talk about this as we not there yet

In closing, private channels for Teams; Go have a look at your IA first:

• Understand what the context of the content is
• Work through the business processes associated with the users in the context of the work object that needs storage in SharePoint
• Understand the permissions required
• Do not approach the requirement from “How can Teams do this”. Rather look at all the cloud apps. You may find that SharePoint is a better fit. And no, I’m not trying to push SharePoint above Teams but always work on the concept of “fit for purpose”. Value Discovery is product agnostic. The mapping happens after the solution statement is built.
• A Teams strategy — Chat based Information Management (That’s what I call it) is super new, even for Slack organisations, mainly because Slack doesn’t have a CDN like SharePoint on the backend. Know what you want to achieve when implementing Teams

End of my mail response

After the rest of the emails carried on, it got me thinking. If there are 16, 450 votes for private channels in Teams, why has it not happened? The following is pure speculation, based on my reasoning so please view it as that:

You have to view Teams in its totality so start with Office 365 groups and SharePoint/Stream/Planner/etc (Since Modern SharePoint sites have groups as the membership service)

Every Team that you create gets a bunch of other stuff for enablement.

Thanks to Matt Wade for the graphic.

Each of the other bits uses Office 365 groups for membership. Now in SharePoint, we know that the O365 group that gets created is added directly to the Site Collection Administrators group when used with Teams. Other things that are associated with the channel for functionality:

• If it needs file storage — SharePoint
• Video — Stream
• Task Management — Planner
• And a few other items (Too lazy to list it here)

What would need to be broken if the channel is private:

• Breaking SharePoint permissions
• Breaking Planner permissions
• Breaking Stream permissions
• Breaking Tab level permissions
• Mail would not work with the group from Outlook because you would then need sub groups if that makes sense
• And the list goes on

The bottom line would be: What part of the functionality in a “private” channel would be the bare minimum required by users for it to function.

Now, the debate will rage on about the validity of private channels, and so will the use cases as many people believe that there are reasons for this.

But understand that there is a ton more on the backend to make this a reality. My response to private channels is summed up in my email. Do I think that it is needed? I see value in it yes, but at the same time, I can create a Team and presto, my need for privacy is handled.

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Be cool my ninjas.