Can Channel owners be changed?

[Courtney Prothero]

I can't find a way to make another user an owner of an already created channel.
What happens to a channel when their owner leaves the organization? Even if it continues working it looks pretty lame to show the owner as someone who is gone - especially when I embed the channel on a Sharepoint page.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

You are correct we do not have a way to change the channel owner. We display the person that created the channel originally. 

For group channels any of the contributors to the group can change channel settings/add/delete them.

But for companywide channels only the person who created the channel and the Stream Admins can change infoabout or delete the channel.

This isn't ideal, I agree with you.

Could you add your ideas about what we should do with channel onwners/creators to the Stream Ideas forum so others can vote/comment on them?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Stream-Ideas/idb-p/StreamIdeas 

[#3]

Would be really useful to assign more then one owner as well for that very reason.. Or at least be able to reassign ownership. With 0365 as IT Admins you were able to change owners very easily - the new 'DIY' stream model isn't really how our business works so will be interesting to see how we can make channels for others and re-assign ownership

[#4]

Added! This is a pretty major requirement especially in a business with over 10,000 staff.

[#5]

Another reason I continue to advocate for the O365 Video model in Stream. Having a stream channel as part of an O365 Group is an ok feature, but at the end of the day it should not be the primary mechanism, Video Portals are majority curated things. 'diy' as you put it has pros, but lots of cons as well, our organization doesnt work like that either.

[#6]

This is not good. If the person who created the channel leaves the organisation, who will then have access to keep working on it?

[#7]

Today with companywide channels there isn't an option to assign a new owner/creator.

We are looking at moving away from the current model of companywide channels over the coming quarters. The new concept would be that all channels would be inside of a group. We do allow multiple owners on a group already so that would solve this issue.

With making all channels be inside a group we'll add a new concept "Stream only groups" as well. With this you can pick if a group is tied to an O365 Group or if it's just a group in stream only not connected to O365.

[#8]

I agree with @Brent Ellis, here. Connecting to a group is definitely a good feature, but it should not be the requirement -- nor should the only other option be 'companywide'. I can imagine a situation where @Marc Mroz's point of a 'Stream only' group might answer this, but without more details can't be sure.

[#9]

@Bill Blais - Just to add a little more detail on the concept we are looking into for "Stream only groups"...

The new group type wouldn't be connected to an O365 Group.

It would have 3 roles where you could assign people control over the group (Owners, Contributors, Viewers).

At each of the 3 roles you can assign both individual users or AD security groups.

Everything else about the group will function nearly the same as the current O365 based groups in Stream today. The stream only group would get a home page, ability to have channels in the group, etc.

[#10]

@Marc Mroz That sounds like it would answer the single biggest roadblock to our users implementing this! Need to see it in action, of course, but this definitely sounds like the right direction. Any timeline on this or is it really 'just an idea'?

For what it's worth, our use case is this: We're an educational institution with instructors who want to provide videos (classes, presentations, etc.) through our 3rd-party LMS.

Currently, unless I'm wrong, there are only 2 ways to do this (and neither is great):

1. Using Groups
   1. Create a full O365 Group with a Stream channel for each separate course
   2. Manually add all the students for each course to relevant Group(s) so they can see the videos (and explain to them to ignore all the other stuff that comes with a Group because it is not used in this context)
   3. Upload the videos and embed them in the LMS
2. As Individual Videos
   1. Upload videos and manually add all the students of a given course to each video
      1. Yes, this step technically may be simplified by making each video visible 'companywide', but many of these videos pertain only to specific courses/students and cannot be made that open, so this is really not an option.
   2. Embed videos in LMS

We currently have an educational account with Google, so YouTube is where our instructors are almost universally posting, since these have more effective permission controls.

[#11]

I'm hoping that we'll have time to do "Stream only groups" in Q2/Q3 (or sooner).

You are correct in the options you listed. 

For option 1 (using groups), there are a good deal of schools that are using groups for each class. I believe many of those schools use the "School data sync" service to keep groups/classes/rosters in sync. https://sds.microsoft.com/

On your last point, what kind of other permissions controls do you feel we are missing that would help in your scenario?

[#12]

Thank you very much for the link to the SDS service (and apologies for delayed response). I had no idea it existed -- we're a pretty lean team here, so no single dedicated resource to investigate all the options. We will definitely look into this. My first reaction, though, is a potential explosion of Office Goups and the confusion that could easily cause with our users as we are still in early stages of awareness/transition from Google to Office 365, but I haven't really read into the SDS yet, so maybe it handles that.

For Stream-only groups, the earlier the better, of course. This would be particularly helpful to get ahead of the next academic year if SDS isn't something we can implement here for whatever reason (I try to plan for the worst), but also for more general use, where full Office Groups are not necessary (at best) or would cause significant noise/confusion for users (at worst).

As for additional permissions, the key one would be an 'unlisted' option, particularly in our non-SDS environment. This is a major need for integrating with our LMS. The default limitation to tenant accounts is great, but making every video for every course visible to every user in Stream is not going to work, partly for privacy and partly for sheer noise.

[#13]

@Marc Mroz - Any word on the 'Stream-only groups' concept? This would be huge for us (and others, I imagine).

[#14]

Real life scenario:  "My boss and another site leaders have asked me to upload videos for them on more than one occasion."    To be speedy about things, I created a channel and started uploading asap.   BUT UGGGG!   Now we all realize that I should have created a group channel 1st to give others access and limit contributors.  Presently, we have several videos uploaded with multiple shared links across the Americas Operations Center channel.   Is the only solution to delete "my" channel, create a group channel and then re-upload all the videos and send out new links?   Please help?    I worry that others will have the group channel after-thought. 

[#15]

Did you share out links to the channel itself or to the videos?

If most people are going to the videos themselves then you can...

1. Create a group
2. Create a channel in the group
3. Go to each of the 6 videos in the old channel and edit the permissions to put them in your new group/channel.
4. Delete the old channel.

When you re-permission a video into a new group/channel it doesn't change the video link URL, those always stay the same. 

Sorry we have a 1 way door here. The technical hurdles to build ability to allow a channel to be companywide to group and back again were more than we were willing to invest in at the time we wrote this code. I agree with you this can be problematic and we should look at improving here.

[#16]

Thank you Marc for the quick reply.    Your solution does sound like it will work.  I do worry that most media creators will not stop and take the time think to create a group First.   Us content creators are all in a rush to get content uploaded ASAP these days.  While we wait for the upload, we usually complete descriptions, meta-tags, thumbnails and decide where to share or embed the video.  I worry that you will be answering this question over and over in the future.    

[#17]

Dear Mark,

Because of the migration from O365 video portal to Stream which is delayed from your side, we are looking to evaluate the migration by ourselves.

Because, we used only a limited number of video use cases, I'm looking to recreate the O365VideoPortal Channels into Stream via the Companywide channel.

I'm doing the content "migration" without specific issue, but the first question is joining that topic:

• I'm the technical person preparing the Channel for a Content Manager as Stream Admin
• My Name is placed as Channel creator and I can't change it

The second linked question is:

• How to delegate the permission to the content manager ?
• How to restrict the basic permission as reader for all the employees ?

The company wide Channel seems to give the permission to read/write to everyone which is simply not acceptable in our case and the Group Channel is not really a solution because that will create all the technical stuff associated with the groups too.

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/groups-channels-overview

----

Companywide channels

Companywide channels are great for organizing videos by topics and providing a way for community-driven content curation.

Characteristics of companywide channels:

• Can be seen by everyone within your company
• Everyone within your company can add videos or remove videos from them
• Only the creator of the channel (and Stream admin) can edit the channel itself
• Only videos that have "Allow everyone in your company to view this video" checked can be added to companywide channels

-----

Do you have any plan to manage the permission set and delegation for the CompanyWide Channel ?

Fabrice Romelard

[#18]

@Fabrice Romelard - You are correct the only option if want a private area in Stream that has permission controls is to use Groups and channels within groups. Companywide channels are for more community driven topics where you don't need to control who can add videos to your channel.

We are evaluating options on if we can create some sort of stream only concept where it's not tied to O365 Groups but it gives you more control over permissions. We originally (months back) were planning on a concept of "Stream only groups." However we haven't started that project, and when we do start it (hoping to star this calendar year), we may decide to take a slightly different plan. We know the pain points around companywide channels and pain points in Stream around O365 Groups so when we pick up this project we'll try to make a balanced decision and build something that helps.

For the time being, I think you should re-look at using O365 Groups for this migration of yours. It will create the SP site and other resources, but for some of those you could just lock them down in those apps and ignore them if you don't want to use them.

[#19]

@Fabrice Romelard

• Everyone within your company can add videos or remove videos from them

I just tested this in my tenant with a user who does not have access to create content and it renders this statement false.

[#20]

Sorry to be specific.

Any users that can upload videos to stream can mark a video as "everyone in the company can view" and then they can add it to ANY companywide channels.

Any users that can edit a video and change permissions, can mark a video as "everyone in the company can view" and then they can add it to ANY companywide channels.