No tenant switching needed | Shared channels in Microsoft Teams

Stop workflow interruptions by continually switching between your organization and guest tenants in Microsoft Teams. Use shared channels in Microsoft Teams to seamlessly work with external organizations while staying in your home tenant.
Shared channels can include a core team, internal members outside of your team, and invited external participants outside of your organization. Once created, it provides a shared workspace as a secure and more efficient means for transparent and open collaboration. It’s a seamless way to bring everyone together as part of an extended team. Importantly, Microsoft Entra cross-tenant access controls are used to establish trust. Users are securely authenticated and authorized on the backend, with channel access based on their individually scoped permissions.
Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, walks through how it works for Teams users, the admin steps for your tenant and your partner's tenant to set everything up, and how to create and manage shared channels in Microsoft Teams.
► QUICK LINKS:
00:00 - Introduction: What are shared channels?
01:45 - End user experience
03:12 - Set up shared channels in Microsoft Teams
04:18 - Set up in Microsoft Entra portal
06:36 - Create a shared channel as a Teams user
08:24 - Wrap up
► Link References:
Check out aka.ms/teamssharedchannelsdocs
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[@bobbydk123]

Make the Azure AD external ID setup easier. Base it on users requests to create a shared channel with other companies - it should send an approval mail to Global admins of both orgs. Admins simply click accept or decline.

[@moepskie]

THIS. So much THIS. Please Microsoft, the current way of doing it (setting up B2B) is not only way too cumbersome, but more importantly most of the external organizations we want to work together with refuse to activate Shared Channels for the following reasons: 1. They have no idea how to set it up (and they don't have the time/skills to learn to do so either) 2. They refuse it by default because they think it's a massive security breach I'm literally pulling my hair out over this because in theory this is a great feature, but I had to disable it for my organization because our external partners won't use it and our employees kept asking why the shared channels were not working...

[@thebiscuittin]

@@moepskie I can see point 2 being an issue. It would be nice to better understand what access and visibility to resources the external org has once they're 'allowed' in B2B direct connect. Surely B2B direct connect wasn't created just for Teams shared channel?

[@imrantahir1687]

excellent and very useful

[@PaulShadwell]

I have done everything you said but I still cannot search for people in the other tenant without entering their full email address or not at all in some instances. You say this is for Shared Channels but what about one-on-one chat. This is what I can getting the most request for.

[@MatijaGrcic]

Being able to use Microsoft Teams without needing to reauthenticate or switch accounts is a major convenience.

[@MotorsportsX]

Can you please tell me how to share whiteboard with external guests???? Its our primary workspace with loops.

[@krisjensen4450]

It appears you cannot add a calendar to a shared calendar, which would be very helpful. Is this something that will be added in the future?

[@MrR9999]

I thought direct connect was destined for the scrap heap after cross tenant sync lands as the backbone of multi tenant collaboration. Seems odd to encourage organisations into yet another deployment they'll have to unpick.

[@Holtermarvin]

Thanks for the good presentation. What I‘m missing here are governance best practices, because in a real organization scenario this is very complicated. We cannot follow Microsofts YOLO everything is possible approach..

[@imrantahir1687]

MS cannot develop " governance" practices for other organizations :). Yes. it can be complicated if an organization doesn't have a policy/practices around collaboration (external and internal). This is just "enabling" organizations who do have proper security governance policies in place, to collaborate better- especially with external organizations.

[@cutela34]

Almost there! This is great, but what if a person works for multiple companies, let’s say a contractor? I still need have to logout and login again. If teams could work like Slack for example would be amazing

[@MSFTMechanics]

Thanks for your comment. Shared channels is designed for that and what is demonstrated in this video. You can have shared channels with more than one organization without switching from your primary login.

[@ridingdmetro]

@@MSFTMechanics this still presumes that the partner organization is receptive to setup the shared authentications. Whilst it was easy to setup the inbound communication authentication from our organization, getting partner organization's IT teams on board with the idea is a nightmare. Ideally, to be a Slack killer app, Teams needs to perform these Entra authentications seamlessly in the backend without intervention from so many admin related activities. Until then, Teams, unfortunately, will continue to only be an internal organization collab workspace platform.

[@shalin4542]

in corp env for backup, the Veeam backup office365 seems cannot backup the Private or Shared channels. anybody know a solution can do?

[@darthphil]

Be good if the sharepoint sites behind the shared channels supported adaptive scopes for labelling. I've been working on a solution that uses adaptive scopes for the sharepoint site behind the main team and the sharepoint sites behind private channels. It's very disappointing that adaptive scopes functionality is missing from shared channel storage.

[@dberumen]

Could not use the feature because one of the tenants has basic AAD subscription and both need to have Premium P1 or higher😬

[@MSFTMechanics]

For scoping to specific users and groups, a P1 license is needed. The scenario demonstrated scoping at the domain level will work without P1.

[@JOhnCeno-jg4zy]

Is the AAD subscription included in Teams?

[@anandhuizinga]

If I join a company's channel, does that company still control all the data in this channel?

[@MSFTMechanics]

The data in that case would reside in the originating organization's SharePoint backend, so yes.

[@anandhuizinga]

@@MSFTMechanics Thanks a lot! Do you know where I can find more information on this? For referencing it would be nice.