Forum Discussion
Adding Guests into Channels
- 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
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.
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
ChrisHoardMVP 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
- There is currently no good way. The feature is still a work in progress but right now it really is meant as a temporary storage space. They did say that they were looking at adding channels that allow guests into them without adding into the Team etc. but right now you cannot do that without making most of your channels private in a team.
Thanks ChrisWebbTech. That's what I feared.
I suppose we will simply need to create equivalent internal and external teams, or make most channels Private. Both options mean overly complex sharepoint file management though, which really isn't ideal.
Either that, or we just don't allow external guest user access, which definitely reduces some of the positive benefits of migrating to Teams.
