Microsoft Teams – Private Channels Findings

Microsoft Teams Private Channels has finally been made public at Ignite 2019! Here my findings on Microsoft Teams – Private Channels

It dropped to my developer tenant today so I thought I’d try it out and here are my findings. I’ve mostly been looking into the new lightweight SharePoint site with the site template “TEAMCHANNEL#0“. Then seeing how users are added, how the Private Channel is linked to the MS Team and any other quirks I found along the way…

You can create a Private Channel by selecting Private from the drop down for the new Chanel menu:

You can only add users to the Private Channel that are members of the Team

A Padlock displays beside the newly created Private Channel to indicate the Channel is Private

The SharePoint Site behind the behind the private channel. Note the URL https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/TeamAlias-privatechannel so in my case https://leonarmston.sharepoint.com/sites/LeonsTestTeam-TestPrivateChannel

Each private channel has it’s own SharePoint site collection optimized for file sharing and fast provisioning.

The separate site collection is to ensure access to private channel files is restricted to only members of the private channel compared to the team site where team owners have access to all the assets within the site collection. These site collections are created with a document library by default, and can be easily enhanced to a full-featured site collection through the site management interface. Each site collection is created in the same geographic region as the site collection of the parent team. These lightweight sites have a custom template ID, “TEAMCHANNEL#0“, for easier management through PowerShell and Graph API.

I found this interesting going to Site Contents for the new Site. It displays a limited subset of components: Documents, Form Templates and Style Library compared to a typical SharePoint site. Not even a pages library and then the default page for the site is the Documents library view.

Examining the details of the Private Channel Site with PowerShell to identify how the site is linked to the group.

It is linked with RelatedGroupID which shows the ID of the group for the MS Team which the Private Channel is associated to.

The new SharePoint site template TEAMCHANNEL#0 is also displayed in the Template property

There is no embedded Office 365 Groups in the Private Channel, Users are added directly unlike a MS Team site where they are added to an Office 365 group which is then embedded inside a SharePoint group.

When a user is added to the Team in MS Teams as Member they are added individually to the the default members group for the SharePoint site.
When users are added to the Owners role for the Private Channel in Teams they are then added individually to the SharePoint site.
It is not possible to change a Team Channel from Private to Public. It is also not possible to convert an existing Public Channel to Private.
Not all Apps are supported on Private Channels and are able to be added as tabs in Teams

This was my findings on Microsoft Teams – Private Channels/ See my other articles on Teams here

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. JB December 14, 2021 Reply

    Soory to bother wich command you had issued to get the results on the blue screen?
    The one that follows the sentence The new SharePoint site template TEAMCHANNEL#0 is also displayed in the Template property
    Thanks in advance
    Javier Bach

    1. Leon Armston December 14, 2021 Reply

      All fixed now Javier – I changed my wordpress code formatting plugin and had missed this one.

      Get-PnPTenantSite -Url “https://leonarmston.sharepoint.com/sites/LeonsTestTeam-TestPrivateChannel” -Detailed is what you are looking for!

  2. JB December 17, 2021 Reply

    Very Good !!! Thanks for that 🙂
    Regards

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