Forum Discussion
Shared Channels not showing up in Teams
- Finally finished discussing with MS support. The resolution is that this is working as designed. They referred to this link https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/shared-channels which indicates that only the Team owner can create Shared Channel. Even though the Admin Center allows you to create a Shared Channel as a Teams Administrator, that is not the correct process and the Admin account must be an owner of the Team it is creating the channel in. I personally think this is a bug in the UI and it should not give the user the option to do it in the first place.
I ran into this same issue recently and wanted to share one additional observation/workaround, because it may help others who end up with partially provisioned shared channels.
In my case, shared channels had been created from the Teams Admin Center while the admin account was not an owner of the parent Team. The result matched what is described here: the underlying SharePoint channel sites existed, but the shared channels were missing, broken, or not usable in the Teams client.
I tried adding myself back as owner of the parent Team and, where possible, also as owner of the shared channels. That improved some visibility, but the result was still inconsistent: the Teams client showed indications that the shared channels should exist, but I still could not open them, even after waiting for backend synchronization/caching.
Then I accidentally discovered something interesting.
I started cleaning up one of the affected Teams, but deleted the wrong Team first. That Team also had the same shared channel issue, although it was not the first one on my cleanup list. I restored the Team afterwards, and immediately after the restore the shared channels came back and started working as expected.
So my current working theory is that restoring the whole Team forced Teams to rehydrate or rebind the shared channel objects correctly, including the relationship between the parent Team, the shared channel objects, and the underlying SharePoint channel sites.
This is not something I would recommend as a normal production fix without careful preparation. Deleting and restoring a Team is risky and should only be done if you fully understand the impact and have verified owners, members, channels, SharePoint URLs, and data. But in a controlled test or recovery scenario, restoring the parent Team may be worth considering when shared channels are stuck in this inconsistent state.
I still agree with the conclusion in this thread: the Teams Admin Center should not allow an admin to create a shared channel in a Team where that admin is not a Team owner, because it can lead to this broken provisioning state.