Forum Discussion
Shared Channel in a Team with external sharing turned off! HELP please!
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.
Thanks Christian. I think we've hit on a few issues here:
1. If a shared channel requires the whole Team / SharePoint site to have external access turned on for it to work, why doesn't the system check and provide an alert if it's turned off when you're creating a shared channel (e.g. "You won't be able to share this shared channel externally as external sharing is turned off").
2. I read all of Microsoft's support documentation before testing Shared Channels and nowhere did I see anything about external sharing having to be turned on for the Team's SharePoint site.
3. I've tested and found that if you subsequently change the parent site to allow external sharing, the shared channel doesn't pick up the change so it will never be able to be shared externally.
4. The whole concept is confusing! The idea of shared channels is to be able to easily collaborate with external users in just one part of a Team. So having to turn on external sharing for the WHOLE Team, with the associated risk of accidental sharing information from other channels, is counterintuitive!
Now, I have in my org-wide setting in SharePoint admin for external sharing put it to the second least permissive option "Existing guests" and OneDrive is turned off for sharing externally. When I go to one of my Teams team with shared channels, still in SharePoint admin, I can select one of those and choose another sharing permission, so I changed it to "No external sharing allowed" for the entire group/site. In my shared channels in that team I can still share files and my direct connect external users can access the Files tab as well.
Again, site permissions for a shared channel site can't be managed independently through SharePoint.
- I understand all of that thanks Christian, but my issue has occurred the other way around.
Global SP settings are fine with external sharing allowed. External sharing for the entire Team / SP site was turned off though (as the site wasn't previously required to be shared externally so a good way of protecting accidental shares).
We then needed to share just one channel externally so setup a Shared Channel. Had I known (i.e. had Microsoft included this requirement in any of their documentation) that external sharing needed to be enabled for the whole Team to share a single channel, I would have allowed external sharing in the SP Admin Center. However, this isn't documented so I setup the channel and had the issues.
I've now gone back and updated the external sharing settings at the site level, but the change hasn't replicated to the shared channel's site so it appears impossible to fix.
It would be interesting to know from your test - if you look at the external sharing policy for the shared channels, does it still show as external sharing allowed in the SP Admin Center? I'm guessing it does, as it hasn't picked up the change you made to the parent site. This is why your test is opposite to mine - you started with a parent site with external sharing turned on, whereas I started with it turned off.
This is going to be very confusing for administrators as is is counterintuitive to have to allow external sharing for a whole Team, just to share a single shared channel ... and it's not documented that this is a requirement.Had to try it. Created a new Team site and added Teams to it. Changed site sharing level to "only in my org" and finally a shared channel. Can't share 🙂
So assuming they are counting on not restricting before shared channel setup.. Will try and ask someone in the Teams PG about it.OzOscroft Trying to get some answers here. Will update if I get any.
- Thanks Christian, much appreciated. I think you're right that they're assuming that the whole site has external sharing turned on - the question is whether this is by design or because of an oversight. Either way, the requirement needs to be documented and ideally a check put in place to avoid other orgs facing the same issue. I'm hoping that they break the inheritance of the external sharing policy between the shared channel's site and the parent site, as by doing that we could fully share the shared channel, but ensure the rest of the Team stays fully internal.