Launched Just Prior to Covid, Private Channels Lost Impetus when Teams Changed Gears

To much excitement at the time, Microsoft introduced private channels for Teams at the Ignite conference in Orlando in November 2019. Teams was a very different proposition then. The Covid pandemic was still a few months away and less than 20 million people used Teams regularly. Private channels were the first major development in Teams since its launch in early 2017. They were a response to the misgivings voiced in many customers that all members of a team enjoyed equal access to channel conversations and the team’s SharePoint Online site.

Roll forward five years and Teams is in a very different place. The pandemic generated huge demand for online collaboration in general and online meetings in particular. Microsoft had to continually strengthen the Azure-based Teams infrastructure to cope with demand as the number of users swelled continually. Growth has slowed recently, but Teams now has 320 million monthly active users, or roughly 80% of the Office 365 installed base based on the latest numbers released by Microsoft.

After their launch, the initial excitement around private channels soon began to fade. In 2021, Microsoft began to hype shared channels (eventually released in 2022). Focus shifted to the possibilities of trans-tenant collaboration rather than the inward-nature restrictions offered by private channels. You can tell where the latest craze exists by counting the number of sessions offered for a specific technology by large conferences.

ESPC in Stockholm

The agenda for technology conferences like ESCP 2024 in Stockholm (December 2-5) is currently dominated by artificial intelligence because that’s what people want to talk about, despite the fact that AI is still not widely used across the Office 365 base. I’ll still enjoy ESPC, where I speak twice about non-AI topics (Mastering the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK and Decoding the Microsoft 365 Audit Log), and I’ll happily listen to the latest propaganda telling me how to work with AI.

Private channels don’t feature on the ESPC agenda, nor did I see anything on the topic at the Microsoft 365 conference in Orlando last May. I suspect that private channels won’t receive much coverage at the upcoming Ignite conference in Chicago. That’s no reflection on the importance or usefulness of the technology. After all, Microsoft 365 conferences usually avoid allocating sessions to cover Exchange Online, despite the essential role that Exchange plays in the overall ecosystem and the massive changes Microsoft is making for hybrid organizations, like forcing tenants to upgrade servers and the introduction of Exchange Server subscription edition next year.

Odd Session Selection at Some Technology Conferences

If conference programs were selected based on the importance of a technology to Microsoft 365 sessions would be dominated by Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Entra ID (including security), and Teams, with some sessions to cover PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph.

However, that’s not what happens, perhaps because the folks who select sessions are overly influenced by Microsoft marketing (including sponsorship dollars). What else accounts for conferences giving valuable time to cover everything in the Viva Suite, Loop, and the like? Far too many conference sessions are given over to technologies that are marginally interesting in terms of overall usage within tenants. There will always be the need for sessions to cover emerging technologies (AI is firmly in this category), but some conference selections are just odd.

The Worth of Private Channels

Back to private channels. My interest was reawakened the other day when discussing a problem a university had. Like most institutions, the university has a program to allow people to file complaints that are then investigated by the relevant facility. They were advised that they’d need to set up a separate team for each facility to store details of investigations in a secure SharePoint site. No one had considered creating a single team with separate private channels for each facility. Private channels limit access to the subset of the team membership who become channel members. No one else, not even team owners, can access the content in the private channel, including its separate SharePoint Online site.

The advantage of using private channels is the avoidance of team sprawl. Creating a new private channel is as easy as creating a regular channel (Figure 1). After creating a private channel, the only other task is to add members to the channel.

In the case in question, all the people in the university who work on complaints can be members of the team with subsets becoming members of the private channels created for the facilities. Team members share common knowledge such as program announcements and guidelines without compromising the integrity of their investigations in any way.

Another advantage is that people won’t create a group chat to take a discussion to a more limited forum. In fact, people should be discouraged from using group chats for anything that involves sensitive information.

An individual team can support up to 1,000 channels, of which up to 30 can be private channels. Being able to segment confidential and sensitive work across private channels within a team is a nice way to protect information. And if you want information to remain even more private, consider creating a sensitivity label that limits access to the members of a private channel and assigning the label to every document stored in the channel. That way, even if a document “escapes” outside the channel, its content will remain inaccessible.

I use private channels daily. They’re a great host for private collaboration on a need-to-know basis. It’s just a pity that so few people seem to know about private channels.