You're reading from Hands-On Microsoft Teams. - Second Edition

Product typeBook

Published inDec 2021

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781801075275

Edition2nd Edition

Tools

Microsoft Teams

Concepts

Real Time Communication

Author (1)

João Ferreira

Private vs Public vs Shared: Teams and Channels

In the first chapter of this book, we covered the basics of all the Microsoft Teams components and the general usage scenarios for teams, channels, and tabs.

In this chapter, we will dive into the teams and channels features included on Microsoft Teams. We will look at the differences between the several types of teams and channels that are available, with scenarios that will help you understand what the best approach to follow is, based on your requirements.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

Understanding public and private teams
Understanding standard channels
Understanding private channels
Understanding shared channels
Understanding team creation governance
Organizing your teams and channels
Understanding team and channel limits

Understanding public and private teams

When creating a new team, you have the option to make it public or private, but before making that decision you need to be aware of the differences between the types.

A public team is discoverable to all members of an organization and is listed in the Teams gallery.

A public team scenario: Peter, the office manager

Peter is responsible for managing the company office in Portugal, so he can do this more effectively and communicate with everyone else. Peter has created a new team for the office where he posts everything relating to it. Anyone working in Portugal or visiting the office can join the team to access things such as the office location and working hours, or simply to ask Peter or any of the other office members for something.

A private team can be discoverable or non-discoverable. To be a member of a team, you need to either be approved or added to the team. If the team is discoverable, you can request to...

Understanding standard channels

Standard channels, as seen in Chapter 1, Microsoft Teams Basics, are subsets of a team and are used to have conversations and share documents on the same topic.

Everything shared in a standard channel becomes available to all the team members. However, this was, for a long time, a major limitation of Microsoft Teams, forcing channel owners to duplicate their teams in order to share private and sensitive information.

Let's look at a scenario to help us understand this:

A standard channel scenario: John, the teacher

John is a teacher responsible for the Engineering 101 course and a strong advocate of Microsoft Teams. He wants to build an e-learning platform for the course using Teams. This platform will be publicly available to all the students and teachers.

John has created a standard channel for each course subject and added all the teachers and the students to the team using their school accounts. John has structured...

Understanding private channels

A private channel has pretty much the same functionalities as a standard channel. The main differences between the two are the dedicated SharePoint site collection and special permissions for each private channel that are not inherited from the team.

A site collection on SharePoint is a container for a group of sites, files, or pages that has its own permissions. A site collection starts with a top-level site and can contain other subsites underneath.

A private channel scenario: Geno, the basketball coach

Geno is a college basketball coach who uses Microsoft Teams to manage everything related to his team. He has created several channels inside his team that are publicly available to athletes, coaches, and staff members. Geno likes to keep information centralized for better management and faster access, so he is looking for a solution that allows him to discuss and share private information with his assistant coaches.

Private...

Understanding shared channels

Shared channels were designed by Microsoft to make the collaboration between different organizations easier. By using a shared channel, users will not need to switch tenants and the notifications from a channel in an external Teams organization will be displayed in your organization's Teams tenant.

Shared channels were announced in March 2021 as part of Microsoft Teams Connect. At the time of writing, this feature is not yet available and is expected to arrive in Q4 of 2021. Everything explained in this section of the book is based on the official announcements made by Microsoft and subject to change until the final release.

Let's take a look at a scenario to help us understand:

Shared channel scenario: Maximo, the basketball team manager

Maximo is a basketball team manager responsible for the communication between sponsors and the team. Communication through Microsoft Teams has not been going smoothly and...

Understanding team creation governance

Governance is something you should plan carefully. If you have an administrator role, make sure you define a set of rules and configure Teams the way you want ahead of time.

This is no easy task and it will always depend on each individual scenario. You should keep in mind that if you leave everything open, Teams can quickly become a wild west with hundreds of teams and channels that don't make sense. On the other hand, if you adopt a restrictive policy, you may lose users and they will eventually look for alternatives to Microsoft Teams (most likely outside of the Microsoft environment).

This section of the book shows you where you can find the teams and channels features that you will be able to adjust to reach a balance on your Microsoft Teams tenant.

On Microsoft Teams, there is no option to disable the creation of new teams. However, it is possible to disable the creation of Office 365 groups—but it is not recommended...

Organizing your teams and channels

Over time, while working with Microsoft Teams, you will end up with dozens of teams and channels in your account. Not all of them will have the same importance and you will want to be able to access the ones that are more relevant to you first.

To help you organize your teams and channels, Microsoft Teams offers the option of pinning your most relevant channels, which are the ones displayed at the top of your teams list, inside a Pinned group:

Figure 5.6.1: Pinned team channels

To make use of the pinning feature, do the following:

Click on … next to the channel name to open the options menu.
Click on Pin:

Figure 5.6.2: Pinning a channel
The channel added to the Pinned group is identified by the team logo, channel name, and team name. By default, a new pinned channel is added to the bottom of the list, but you can manually sort them by clicking on the pinned channel and, without releasing...

Understanding team and channel limits

Microsoft Teams was designed to support large organizations; however, it is not unlimited and there are some boundaries in all the features we have seen in this chapter. In the following table, you will find the platform limits for teams and channels covered in this chapter:

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned about the functionalities associated with the core features of Microsoft Teams. You've met all the available teams (public and private) and channel types (standard, private, and shared) and been presented with scenarios that will help you decide when to use each one. You've also learned how to effectively manage teams and channels to keep your Microsoft Teams tenant clean and organized. Finally, you have been introduced to the limits of the platform for teams, channels, and the number of users. By being aware of these limits, you will be able to plan and deploy Microsoft Teams effectively in large organizations.

In the following chapter, we will look at how you can create teams using templates, speeding up your Microsoft Teams adoption.

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Author (1)

João Ferreira

João Ferreira is an acclaimed Microsoft MVP, MCP, and MCSA. João has been working with SharePoint for the last 9 years and embraced Microsoft Teams right from day one. João is responsible for the development of several products and is also the owner of 4 blogs: HANDS-ON tek, HANDS-ON SharePoint, HANDS-ON Teams, and HANDS-ON Lists.
Read more about João Ferreira

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Feature	Limit
Teams created per user	250
Maximum number of teams per user	1,000
Maximum number of members in a team	25,000
Org-wide teams limit per tenant	5
Maximum number of...