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Changing Channel from private

Brass Contributor

Hi,

so after searching I cannot find the answer to this.

I've created a team that will have channels in it representing different projects.

I've made one channel private so that I can choose which team members have access to it.

But now, I want to revoke that and allow all team members to see the channel.

I can't figure out how though.

Other than deleting the channel and that isn't an option.

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

47 Replies
Once you make a channel private, you cannot revet back to public...at least for now this is not a feature provided in Teams

@Juan Carlos González Martín  This is interesting news as of now :) 

The reasoning behind this is that a private channel is in fact an embedded private team within that Team. If you look at sharepoint, this is a complete new site collection.

Although I understand, this is a bit frustrating to me personally.
Syncing the whole file structure is impossible this way.
I wanted to make some public channels private, but this is also impossible, just like the way around like Kev mentioned. I really hope some improvements to this are in the dev pipeline.
This has caused me more trouble than I expected. I'm still fairly new to Teams and SharePoint admin so maybe and there is a workaround.
Seeing as I can now NOT turn my private channel (proj1) back to public, I've had to create a new Team with a new channel called proj1. Ideally I need to move all the contents from the private channel in the other team into this new team/channel so I can continue to work with the relevant permissions/members applied.
Can anyone please advise on this?
Even I have the same issue, any workaround would be highly appreciated

@kevjackson While you can't just switch it back to public (there are some privacy implications here to be aware of, for instance if someone posted something that was supposed to be private in a small group and then that was made public - institutionally, people may need to scrub through the entire chat history if making a channel public again), what you can do is just give everybody on the team permissions to that private channel, effectively making it public. That is a better way to ensure you don't unintentionally give access to people that shouldn't have access in the future, though it does take more administrative work.

Not really a viable solution imho, making all channels private will cause sharepoint to create a new site each channel. This will cause frustration for the user who want to sync the whole folder structure locally (whole team files), they then need to press sync on each channel.

 

Any updates here? Trying to figure out if I need to set aside some time to move everything into a new channel...

 

 

Hi, is that definitely correct about the private *channels* within a Group's Team chat, that it creates a whole separate site collection? 

My understanding was that it creates a folder within that Group's SharePoint folders, just as it does when creating any channel, just protected and only accessible only by those invited users. That's how it seems to present it. 

If so, this has implications in terms of internal governance. For reference, we have turned off the functionality that allows all staff to create Groups, but they can still create channels (or at least, the admins for those Groups can).

Thanks!

@DirkHaex 

I just created a private channel within a public team.
Opened the files in that private channel:
https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/teamname-Testchannel/

Opened files in one of the public channels:
https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/teamname/

As you can see the files are stored in a separate sharepoint site collection.
In Teams the channel is contained within 1 Team.

When you sync the whole team files, this channel will not be added automatically as it is stored in a separate collection. You need to manually (or via Intune) add the library to your synced locations.

Yeah, new team site , a special template though! No new office 365 group is created!

@CaseyMcD 

 

I am now reconfiguring all my teams. You cannot change channels from public to private or vise-versa as some instructions on the net elude to.

 

Also, when creating new channels, if you screw up and forget to make it private, you cannot delete it and then immediately create a new one with the same name. That may work after the retention period has expired.

 

I guess this was the only way to have private channels in Teams as it sits on top of SharePoint. I doubt Teams was actually meant to have private channels as it defeated the whole "Team" concept.

Poor planning from MS for not understanding what the community wanted and needed I am thinking.

 

The principle of private channel indeed defaults the whole idea about a 'Team', but for certain things this could offer a solution.
Think about a place to store information to retain for longer periods (not retention policies), like customer contracts, finalized projects etc.
This way it still keeps the team documents together but it is still a dedicated more confined space.

Got to love the afterthoughts at MS :)

 

 

 

This discussion is about changing CHANNELS from public to private or vice versa - not about changing the TEAM privacy setting, which is easy to do as you've posted.

@DBake01 

 

Yep, I realized that too late and then lost the link to the topic - sorry :)

 

-k

 

If a team was originally set to public and files were shared and has since been switch to private how do you make sure all of the files are no longer viewable outside the private team. Thus far I have deleted all of the files and switch the teams group to private. I do have several channels set up with in the team.
A team has members. The general channel is available to all team members.

A private channel has a lock on it.

Anything inside the private channel is private. No one can see inside.

To allow someone to use the private channel, that person must exist in the team.

You have to add only those in the team you want in the channel.
1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by ThereseSolimeno (Microsoft)
Solution
You can transfer any collaborated documents from one library to another, easily enough. But AFAIK you cannot transfer text chats.

If you REALLY need to retain the chat, the admin can download all Team chats in a CSV that you could cut down to just include chat from this channel and share it as an Excel file. Not quite as usable but at least the info and discussion isn't lost.

Alternatively, screenshot the messages you need to retain, or somehow look at retaining the channel but locking it to further discussion.

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