Forum Discussion
Teams and Channels - Private Vs Public
I'm not a big fan of private channel because of the overhead it creates (New sharePoint site) and some missing features like plan a meeting for a private channel. I think the only driver to get private channel is for confidential discussions. My definition of a team is people who works together... However, it makes sense to get some sensitive/admin documents not available to everyone in the team. The way I do it is to create a sub folder into a channel and change permissions on the folder in SharePoint.
This is how I see it.
How do you create a Public channel and keep the documents on the channel as view only?
Do you mean they would be read/write for members and read-only for everyone else in the org?- Yes, everyone in the org would have read only access. And if we make the channel Public, users can access the sharepoint site without us having to grant them access individually? And will they be able to add the Team channel to their list of channels and their access to the files will stay the same?
Just to clarify: There are no public channel, just standard & private channels and private & public teams.
If your Team is a private Team and you want everyone in the organization to have read-only access to the SharePoint related site, you just need to add "Everyone except external users" in the site permissions with read-only rights. Users who are not members of the Team won't obvioulsy be able to go into this team channels to access the files. However they can access these files in different ways:
1) From the SharePoint related site
2) From one of their team by adding a SharePoint Document Library Tab referencing the Document Library of the SharePoint site (or even the website tab with the document library URL)
3) From one of their team by adding a cloud storage in the "Files" tab in one of their channels referencing the Document Library of the SharePoint site
Note: To avoid issues, add "Everyone except external users" at the site root permissions. Do not add it into the SharePoint Visitors Group as there is a background job that removes "Everyone except external users" from the SharePoint Visitors Group on SP site based on private M365 groups. This was the case before and it is unclear if this job is still running now....
Hi Matcole It would seem to me that one could make the documents in the private channel read-only at the document level, not the Teams level. I admit that I haven't done this - all of the docs I access can be edited by members of the private channel. Just a thought.
