Forum Discussion
Adding Guests into Channels
Hi all,
After some advice here as we are new to MST free version.
When adding an individual as a guest to a channel MST is giving guests access to all channels within that team.
Are we doing something wrong or is this a functionality of MST?
If it is a functionality, it seems to defeat the object as guests are being spammed and added to channels I don't wish to give them visibility to.
Any advice on the subject would be most welcome.
Kind regards,
Greg.
- Hmm whilst I see the point, I personally think Teams sprawl is worse - and the amount of swapping context, hiding, pinning notifications become more difficult to manage. It's like entropy
I am running a team with a dozen private channels with guests and it's working perfectly. People only have access to what they are added to and can't see the other channels.
So whilst I would disagree on a personal level, obviously it's good to have a choice where you can measure up the pro's and con's of both approaches
Best, Chris
7 Replies
- You need to equate Channels to Teams. You add guests to a Team and they have access to the Team and all it's channels.
You can work around this by making all your channels private and allowing guests access to a few channels they need access to as Chris said, but it's really not maintainable. You are better off having multiple Teams where your guests and users are in one Team and the stuff guests don't need access too go in another Team.- Hmm whilst I see the point, I personally think Teams sprawl is worse - and the amount of swapping context, hiding, pinning notifications become more difficult to manage. It's like entropy
I am running a team with a dozen private channels with guests and it's working perfectly. People only have access to what they are added to and can't see the other channels.
So whilst I would disagree on a personal level, obviously it's good to have a choice where you can measure up the pro's and con's of both approaches
Best, ChrisChrisHoardMVP Sounds like a sensible idea, one Team with multiple private (or public if required) channels within it. We have a number of external suppliers/partners so it would be useful to add these as Guest users in Teams, but not provide them with full access to all channels associated with the team.
A follow-up question though (apologies if this should be a separate post in its own right!)...
When you set up a Team, a mirror SharePoint team site is automatically created. We want to make better use of team sites in this way, to improve the way information is shared within and across teams.
When you create a private channel, an associated team site is also created, however I have not found a way to navigate to this from within sharepoint as yet - having to "open in sharepoint" from within Teams.
The idea was to make the various Team sites visible to all staff, to promote visibility of files and activities across the business (those which are not confidential, of course!), but the private team sites don't appear to support this approach.
Any thoughts as to how best to achieve these two goals?
- Add guest users and control what they see
- Promote internal cross-team visibility via sharepoint
Thanks
- Hi G-MAN-UK
This is the default behaviour. If you give someone guest access to a team, then they will have access to all standard channels. Guests cannot see Private channels unless you add them
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/private-channels
So I would advise utilising private channels in Teams. Note there is a limit of 30 private per Team and you can't convert public to private so would need to recreate
Hope that answers your question
Best, Chris
