Feb 17 2021 07:45 AM
Hello everyone!
I'm interested in soliciting discussion on the best practices when setting up teams and channels inside of MS Teams.
First, let me give you a bit of overview in our deployment. We are using Teams to manage most of our internal projects, and while it works great internally, our setup causes some problems when trying to bring people outside of our organisation into Teams for discussion and collaboration.
As an example, we have set up a Production team with channels for each client. This works great internally. Each Production team member has access to the information they need to complete deployment for the client with all the rich features Teams brings to the table.
The issue comes when we want to provide clients access to their project. Currently, unless we're missing something, outside users can only be added to teams, and not channels.
To get around this, it seems like we'd need to change our Teams setup and create teams for each client, which seems excessive and really counter-productive from an efficiency standpoint. We would have hundreds of teams to manage, which seems like an administrative nightmare.
The alternative to this is to create secondary teams for the client to join, but then we have the issue of either having two copies of documents (one in the Production team and a dupe in the client's team), and two different conversation threads, etc.
Operationally, we're kinda stuck on this one and would be very appreciative of advice from anyone else running into similar issues. It seems like being able to share channels outside of the org would be the answer, but we're assuming there is some kind of technical hurdle with this since it's not already a 'feature'.
Thank you all, and I look forward to your thoughts.
Todd
Feb 17 2021 10:40 AM - edited Feb 17 2021 11:14 AM
Hi Todd. Guest users certainly can participate in channels as shown here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/guest-experience#comparison-of-team-member-and-guest...
Feb 17 2021 11:07 AM
Solution
If guest users simply need to access files, you could extend permissions to them to the underlying SharePoint folder associated with the Client Channel.
If guests need to participate via the Teams interface and also have access to Posts, Planner, etc you could make every Client Channel in the Team a Private Channel, then add guests to the Team overall and only to relevant Private Channel(s).
For the second option, it may not be ideal if you're already actively using a Team with Standard Channels, as they can't be converted to Private.
I'd be curious how others have handled this use case.
Feb 17 2021 11:12 AM
@PeterRising this link leads to a notice about an event happening today. is that the intent or did you mean to link to an article detailing guest access to channels?
Feb 17 2021 11:15 AM
Feb 18 2021 03:29 AM
@PeterRising Oh goodness, this is a game changer! Thank you so much for pointing this out. We've been floundering here, and have spent tens of man-hours trying to figure out how to do this. :)
THANK YOU!
Feb 18 2021 03:32 AM
Feb 18 2021 03:40 AM
Apr 02 2021 02:09 AM