Forum Discussion
Linking Teams to a Communication site?
When you create a new Teams channel, by default it will deploy a linked team site in SharePoint for the files to be stored in. However, we need to create a Teams channel that links to a communication site, not a team site.
I know you can add an extra tab in Teams and link any document library from any site, but this is not what we want. We need the actual 'files' tab in Teams to be directly linked to a communication site. However, when creating a Teams channel there is no option to choose a comms site, it just defaults to a team site.
Is there any way I can do this?
14 Replies
I think Microsoft design is correct, They way that most of the people using the communication site are make it public for all departments and make Team site private for the department users.
- Assuming you Mean Team tied to the communication site. You say channel but that is wrong terminology.
Anyway, this isn't possible today. But there isn't really anything special about a communication site other than the fact that it has top nav bar vs. .left nav bar. The ability to change this nav is coming in the near future, so you'll be able to fufill this need.
Other than that, what feature was it that is requiring a comm site instead of the default site that comes with a Team?- 'nothing special' .. hmm beg to differ: when will a Teams site get the ability to add a 'full width' web part.
To be honest, the only reason we wanted to use a Communication site is to take advantage of the centered page columns. Team sites (in my opinion) don't look great with all the web parts and content pushed to the left of the screen with all that white space on the right hand side. Unfortunately many of our staff have 2K monitors so it can look a bit out of place. We've had many comments in the past saying "why is there all this white space on the right?" and from a user's perspective it looks like we've designed the site poorly.
The full width hero web part is also very useful for our needs too. We can use it to display our IT services in a nice visual banner, better than what the team sites seem to offer as far as visual apps go.
Toby McDaid Are there specific features of a Communications site that you want to use, ones that a Team Site doesn't provide? Or are you just interested in a Communications site because it allows everyone permission to it by default?
If you are only concerned about access and not features, have you thought about granting permissions to the connected Team site by using "old fashioned" SharePoint permissions?
What I mean by this is that instead of adding the non-IT users to the Members group of the IT Team, you would go to the SharePoint site and add them to the SharePoint Visitors group which is found in the Site Permissions -> Advanced Permissions Settings page. This way, your IT Team members will be able use Teams and everything else as members of that group, while other people can be granted access to just the SharePoint team site.
- the only way to do that is as you have already mentioned - add a document library tab.
I think this is such poor design from Microsoft. We can add the Communications site as an additional document library tab, but it just means any documents uploaded to the Teams channel are stored on some other random team site. We end up with two SharePoint sites linked to one Teams, and one of those sites is just an empty site clogged up with Teams attachments. All it does is creates a mess on our tenant.
- I agree, this is frustrating. It is helpful to allow users to discover a Communications site through Teams where people are very accustomed to working.
