Shared Channels: Revolution or Missed Opportunity?

The Hype

One of the most exciting announcements (video) from Ignite 2021 was that of Shared Channels (Microsoft Teams Connect) which seemingly promised to finally resolve the considerable friction involved with cross-tenant collaboration (collaborating with other organizations using Microsoft365).

If you've had to switch Teams instances just to see a message from another tenant, you can understand the frustration. At the very least, it's disruptive to the flow of work.

How many times have you tried to do this while in a Teams meeting in your home tenant, only to be warned that changing will drop you off your current call? Or perhaps you’ve tried changing tenants but been greeted with a message like the following? Yikes!

This has been a problem for a while. It caused other issues like having too many guest users in many tenants worldwide. For some, the ability to keep a ‘secondary’ Teams open on the web to access another tenant’s information was a viable option, this does not work at scale.

Benefits

Shared Channels in Teams promised to resolve a list of common challenges with effective collaboration with external users, including:

• No more painful tenant switching: By seeing cross-tenant channels as Shared Channels within our own environment, the lines between organizations become blurred and work can take place unhindered
• Avoid over-sharing information: By allowing for the privacy of content at the channel level, we avoid the risk of users seeing content elsewhere within the Team and Office 365 Group.
• Reduce Team proliferation: Instead of creating a long list of barebones and shallow Teams, merely to support sharing across organizations, we can now facilitate fewer but ‘architecturally deeper’ Teams
• Improve visibility of information and reduce duplication of content: By allowing for centralized channels, we can reduce and eliminate channels created for the same purposes but spread across multiple teams and reduce them with a single source of truth which also simplifies the management and monitoring of information within the channel

Limitations

While Shared Channels offer most of the same functionalities available within other channels, there are a few features that are not supported, including:

• Shared channels support tabs except for Stream, Planner, and Forms.
• LOB apps, bots, connectors, and message extensions are not supported.
• When you create a team from an existing team, shared channels in the existing team won’t be copied over.
• Notifications from shared channels are not included in missed activity emails.

Considerations

There are many similarities between Shared Channels vs Private Channels. Much like Private Channels, each Shared Channel gets its own dedicated SharePoint Site. In the case of both Private and Shared Channels, this can cause a multitude of SharePoint sites to host the content from a single Microsoft Team. In fact, this is largely the reason behind a recent UX tweak introduced by Microsoft to attempt to stitch these disparate sources together :

It is also important to remember that it is currently impossible to convert an ordinary channel into a Shared channel, meaning that a decision must be made carefully upon creation, otherwise, re-work and re-architecture may be required.

Adoption Challenges

While the promise of Shared Channels was significant, with the ability to now see the functionality in action as part of the Public Preview, there are a number of considerable challenges with its use.

Conclusion

We love the idea of Shared Channels, and while it sounded great on paper and looked promising when we first saw it at Ignite, what we can now see is there is a significant security conversation at play, and many organizations will be unable to leverage this feature. What do you think?

Alas, all may not be lost. We feel there remains great potential for this feature, even for organizations with strict policies. Stay tuned for the next article where we’ll lay it out!