Add employee to specific Team but with restricted folder access

[DanSD]

Hello -

I am setting up Teams as the main workhub for our small 5 person company. I've already created the appropriate Teams and their respective channels but now need to give a new employee (with an Office 365 account just created for him) access to most of the folders within one of the Teams.

The main goal is to let him see several folders that hold site plans and other photos but not the folders such as Accounting or client information. The other crucial point is that he have access to the Chat feature for that Team on the mobile app on his phone since he is out in the field much of the day.

Thanks so much for any guidance since I've run into a roadblock. If I simply add him as a Member of the Team then he inherits the "Edit" permissions that I want to reserve just for other employees that are already Members.

[#2]

Your correct on the permissions. If you mean folders by channel or on the underlying SharePoint site then the only way you can accomplish this is to make your current members all owners of the team and make the new hire a member. Then you can remove the member group from the folders you don’t want them to access. Keep in mind this will still grant access to all channels chat history.

Alternative solutions could be migrating files out to another SharePoint site collection and attaching these more private locations to a team channel tab or using cloud storage options on the file tab. You can customize the permission on that site and content how you want.

And last you could create new channels that are private that would contain the files that need to stay private but that new person would not have chat access to the channel nor files. So this may not work.

[#3]

Thank you very much for the thorough reply. @Chris Webb 

Yes I do mean folders by channel, and since I'd like to keep the existing Members as they are with no Owner permissions (create channels/etc) the first solution may not be ideal in our case. I think your last suggestion is the route I'll have to go, creating a new private channel within the existing Team where I'd move all sensitive Accounting/client information...or even perhaps a dedicated new Team just for this Maintenance person.

One additional question that may change my approach, for existing "public" Channels that I've been using for a while, am I able to change them to be "private" or will I need to create new private Channels from scratch and move the desired folders into them from the public counterparts? This could eliminate the need to create a separate one-off Team.

Thanks again.