Microsoft Teams: Public and Private Teams and Channels

Overview

A team is designed to bring together a group of people who work closely to get things done. Teams can be dynamic for project-based work (for example, launching a product, creating a digital ship room), as well as ongoing, to reflect the internal structure of your organization (for example, departments and office locations). Conversations, files and notes across team channels are only visible to members of the team.

Teams (within Microsoft Teams)

Teams are a collection of people, content, and tools surrounding different projects and outcomes within an organization.

Channels

Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines—-whatever works for your team! Files that you share in a channel (on the Files tab) are stored in SharePoint. To learn more, read How SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business interact with Teams.

Channels are places where conversations happen and where the work actually gets done. Channels can be open to all team members or, if you need a more select audience, they can be private. Standard channels are for conversations that everyone in a team can participate in and private channels limit communication to a subset of people in a team.

Channels are most valuable when extended with apps that include tabs, connectors, and bots that increase their value to the members of the team. To learn more, see Apps, bots, & connectors in Teams.

View this short video to learn more about best practices for creating teams and channels:

• TechTip: Guidance for Creating Teams & Channels including Private Channels in Microsoft Teams (21:08 min)

Membership, roles, and settings

Team membership

When Teams is activated for your entire organization, team owners can invite anyone at your organization they work with to join their team. Teams makes it easy for team owners to add people in the organization based on their name. Depending on your organization's settings people from outside of your organization can be added to your teams as guests. See Guest Access in Microsoft Teams for more information.

Team owners can also create a team based on an existing Microsoft 365 group. Any changes made to the group membership will be synced with Teams automatically.

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Team roles

There are two main roles in Teams:

• Team owner - The person who creates the team. Team owners can make any member of their team a co-owner when they invite them to the team or at any point after they’ve joined the team. Having multiple team owners lets you share the responsibilities of managing settings and membership, including invitations.
• Team members - The people who the owners invite to join their team.

In addition, if moderation is set up, team owners and members can have moderator capabilities for a channel. Moderators can start new posts in the channel and control whether team members can reply to existing channel messages. Team owners can assign moderators within a channel. (Team owners have moderator capabilities by default.) Moderators within a channel can add or remove other moderators within that channel. For more information, see Set up and manage channel moderation in Microsoft Teams.

Note

When you add a team owner, they are also added as a member, except when the team is created in the Teams admin center or when a team is added to a new or existing Microsoft 365 group.

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Team settings

Team owners can manage team-wide settings directly in Teams. Settings include the ability to add a team picture, set permissions across team members for creating standard and private channels, adding tabs and connectors, @mentioning the entire team or channel, and the usage of GIFs, stickers, and memes.

One key early planning activity to engage users with Teams is to help people think and understand how Teams can enhance collaboration in their day to day lives. Talk with people and help them select business scenarios where they are currently collaborating in fragmented ways. Bring them together in a channel with the relevant tabs that will help them get their work done. One of the most powerful use cases of Teams is any cross-organizational process.

When you create a new team or private channel in Microsoft Teams, a team site in SharePoint gets automatically created. To edit the site description or classification for this team site, go to the corresponding channel’s settings in Microsoft Teams.

Teams Privacy settings

To change the privacy settings for an existing Team, select the ellipsis "..." next to the team's name.

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Select "Edit team"

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Select the Privacy dropdown and select Private or Public.

All Teams should be set to "Private" for security surrounding sensitive documents and information. 

If the Team will not be used for sharing of sensitive information, it can be set to "Public."

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Private channels in Microsoft Teams

Private channels in Microsoft Teams create focused spaces for collaboration within your teams. Only the users on the team who are owners or members of the private channel can access the channel. Anyone, including guests, can be added as a member of a private channel as long as they are already members of the team.

Mines encourages use of private channels to limit collaboration to those who have a need to know or if you want to facilitate communication between a group of people assigned to a specific project, without having to create an additional team to manage.

For example, a private channel is useful in these scenarios:

• A group of people in a team want a focused space to collaborate without having to create a separate team.
• A subset of people in a team want a private channel to discuss sensitive information, such as budgets, resourcing, strategic positioning, and so on.

A lock icon indicates a private channel. Only members of private channels can see and participate in private channels that they are added to.

When a private channel is created, it's linked to the parent team and can't be moved to a different team. Additionally, private channels can't be converted to standard channels and vice versa.

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Private channel creation

By default, any team owner or team member can create a private channel. Guests can't create them. The ability to create private channels can be managed at the team level and at the organization level.

The person who creates a private channel is the private channel owner and only the private channel owner can directly add or remove people from it. A private channel owner can add any team member to a private channel they created, including guests. Members of a private channel have a secure conversation space, and when new members are added, they can see all conversations (even old conversations) in that private channel.

Team owners can see the names of all private channels in their team and can also delete any private channel in the team. (A deleted private channel can be restored within 30 days after it's deleted). Team owners can't see the files in a private channel or the conversations and member list of a private channel unless they are members of that private channel.

Team members can only see private channels that they've been added to.

Adding and removing owners and members

A private channel owner can't be removed through the Teams client if they are the last owner of one or more private channels.

If a private channel owner leaves your organization or if they are removed from the Microsoft 365 Group associated with the team, a member of the private channel is automatically promoted to be the private channel owner.

If a team member leaves or is removed from a team, that user will also leave or be removed from all private channels in the team. If the user is added back to the team, they must be added back to the private channels in the team.

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Channel owner settings

Each private channel has its own settings that the channel owner can manage, including the ability to add and remove members, add tabs, and @mentioning for the entire channel. These settings are independent of the parent team settings. When a private channel is created, it inherits settings from the parent team, after which its settings can be changed independently of the parent team settings.

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Private channel owner and member actions

The following table outlines what actions owners, members, and guests can do in private channels.