Teams Sharepoint - is it possible to have folders dedicated specifically for restricted channels?

[JJ_00]

Hi all, 

How to set up Teams/Sharepoint in a way I can have folders dedicated specifically for restricted channels, that would reflect Channel membership permissions on SharePoint? Right now, I have created a team but when trying to access the library of specific channel, it opens a separate SharePoint site and that's not really convenient.

I need a setup where I will have a dedicated major Library with different permission settings for each channel (so people from different channels don't have access to other, already existing ones) but still being a part of the same Teams, having one common SP Site but not being able to access files from other Channels (=Libraries here). 

Is it possible at all? Or if not, maybe reading through what I'm trying to achieve here, you have any other proposals how to set it up? Theoretically, we could manually configure folder for each channel but then, it's not linked, and there won't be time to maintain it. I would like it to happen automatically. So if people would upload anything to a channel, it will automatically land in relevant folder, available only to the channel members and NOT on a separate site dedicated to that channel..., that is completely plain, it's a really bad setup. 

Thank you for any advice

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@JJ_00

The architecture of Teams is that it creates separate SPO sites for Private (and Shared) channels. That has been the way since they were introduced. 

You could do something like break inheritance permissions in the sites created by the private channels, then add SharePoint cloud storage and add the original SharePoint Site, and then configure the permissions on the original SharePoint Site folders: that would work however, this would all be manual. Having dealt with this in the past I have previously raised to allow mapping of subfolders via cloud storage to do this as opposed to having to go through the root.

Allow mapping of a SharePoint Subfolder via Cloud Storage · Community (microsoft.com)

Unfortunately, there just isn't a way to do what you need automated due to design. There are several feedbacks (and were on the old user voice) which questioned this, however Microsoft's usual reason for keeping the segregation between SharePoint Sites is logical isolation, security and compliance - in other words sensitive information could be put into those private channels, so it should not be accessible on the same site as the one linked to the Teams/Public Channels. I get that it's frustrating, yet to be as transparent as possible, it would be unlikely to change anytime soon because of the reason above, and the scale that would involved to change the whole architecture of Teams and SharePoint

Another potential avenue to look into is Azure File Server and mount it like a traditional on prem file server. Whilst I wouldn't recommend it given you have SPO/Teams, some organisations find this more to their taste and use SharePoint for other things like Intranet

Hope that answers your question

Best, Chris

[#3]

Hi Christopher,

Thank you so much for this comprehensive reply, really appreciate it!

JJ