Forum Discussion
Introducing Teams Private Channels
Microsoft launched private channels for Teams at the Ignite conference. This article describes the architecture and structure of private channels and discusses their intended usage. In a follow-up, I'll go into how to create and manage private channels in a Teams deployment and discuss some of the issues you should consider when using this new feature.
- Thanks for the information.
Are your future articles going to give insight on what happens when the Creator/Owner is no longer in the Team or Tenant if they were the only Owner of the Private Channel? As a Global Admin it concerns me that many orphaned Private Channels will be cluttering SharePoint and or Teams as time goes on.Forrest_H There is a mechanism to ensure that a private channel always has an owner. It's imperfect and flawed but should be improved over time. See https://www.petri.com/managing-teams-private-channels for details.
- Thanks Again! Anxiety level has been lowered.
- One consequence of private channels landing is that Teams no longer seems to display the classification in the top right corner. You either get ‘Team’ in normal channels or ‘Channel’ when in a private one. Bit of a pain when you have spent some time educating users on classifications.....
- After doing a lot of reading it looks like it isn’t private channels that’s caused the change to classification display but more likely the new sensitivity labels for groups. Not had any announcement in the tenant but I assume that as it’s now in preview it’s just there for everyone and teams has been updated to cater for it, regardless of whether it’s enabled or not.
Ian Mears Sensitivity labels support in Teams starts in preview on November 20. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/sensitivity-labels-teams-groups-sites
When labels are used, they replace the text-only classification labels defined in the Azure AD policy for Office 365 Groups. As such, they have no effect on private channels except that the classification is one of the properties synchronized from the parent team to the private channel.
Hello TonyRedmond
Very interesting, but could you tell me how it would be possible to migrate our public channels that are already created to PRIVATE please? PowerShell?
Sofianeda1st No out of the box way to export channel content and you can't convert a standard channel to private I'm afraid
TonyRedmond, looking forward to private channels in our tenant. It has been a big request among our users.
