Forum Discussion
Managing the Discoverability of Private Teams
Microsoft has a new approach to control private team discoverability. You can have all-in access by enabling discoverability through Teams policies or granular access by using sensitivity labels to control if private teams are discoverable or not. This article explains how both methods work.
3 Replies
Hi Tony, one of my clients noticed that private teams are not discoverable even when the 'Discover private teams' is enabled (On) in the Teams Admin centre AND there are no sensitivity labels applied to Groups and Sites. We noticed that, if you created the private M365 Group first and included a Team, the Team was discoverable. But if an end user created the private Team first, the Team was not discoverable to others. The key difference between the two was that, when the Group was created first, 'HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled' was set to 'False' for the Unified Group but when the Team was created first, this setting was 'True'.
Any idea what might be causing private Teams to remain undiscoverable (including via search) when the Teams setting to allow it is enabled and no sensitivity labels are applied to Groups and Teams?
Thanks always, Andrew
I suspect that this is a mismatch in properties populated by the different routes used to create the team. The HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled property controls visibility for Outlook clients. Creating a MIcrosoft 365 group implies that you want to access it with Outlook, so the flag is set to false. But Teams doesn't need Outlook access, so when a team is created (and creates the underlying Microsoft 365 group), the flag ends up being set. This might have an effect on how discoverability works. Probably worth submitting a bug report to Microsoft.
Thank you Tony, really appreciate your response to this.
