Forum Discussion
Shared Channel in a Team with external sharing turned off! HELP please!
Hi all - confusing conundrum which I'm not sure how best to solve! Here's the overview:
- We've created a Shared Channel with external participants and they can join in conversations fine.
- However, they can't upload any docs or access the Shared Channel's SharePoint site. They get a "That didn't work. External Sharing is disabled" error.
- The parent Team's SharePoint site does indeed have external sharing turned off.
- When I go to the channel site (for the Shared Channel, in the SharePoint Admin Center) it says "This site can't be shared externally", but doesn't give me any options to turn it on!
- All Azure AD B2B direct connect settings are as they should be.
Does this mean that for shared channels to work, we have to turn on external sharing for the whole parent site??? This seems counter-intuitive from a security perspective as we've setup the shared channel so external people will only ever have the option of accessing that - we don't want any accidents where something elsewhere in the Team is shared with them!
... or am I missing something else? I thought the external sharing settings above were only for Guest users, and external users in Shared Channels aren't treated as Guest users.
I really hope you can help me solve this puzzle!
OzOscroft Answer received.
"When a shared channel is created, that creates a new site collection that does a one-time copy of the parent site collection. The channel site sees that external sharing is disabled, and does the same. From that point on it is managed separately and not synced if the parent changes. The two options are to re-create the shared channel after sharing externally is enabled at the parent or use SPO PowerShell to turn on external sharing for the shared channel's site collection.Thanks for raising this to our attention, we will look at how best to document this behavior."Just tried the second option above and it works great. You use this Set-SPOSite (Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell) | Microsoft Docs with the -SharingCapability parameter.
- Hi, you can't toggle to "only people in my organization" as direct connect users aren't in your organization.
- Hi Christian - I'm not trying to set it to only people in my org. It's setup for us to work with external users in the shared channel - they can access the Posts tab, but not the Files tab.
How are you supposed to share files in the shared channels SharePoint library (Files tab) if your organization is not allowing external sharing? You have to look at both the org-wide settings and the site sharing settings in general. And then keep in mind that membership to the site owner and member groups are kept in sync with the membership of the shared channel. Site permissions for a shared channel site can't be managed independently through SharePoint.
Forgot this Shared channels in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs
