This blog is part of a series on Teams. For more articles, check back often.
Written: 28/09/2019 | Updated: N/A
Some channel conversations necessitate a lot of communication between team members. Others may just generate a significant amount of noise which has no real benefit for the Teams’ productivity or which regularly goes off on a tangent from the work. Instead of an open style forum where everyone can post and reply, we may simply want a channel where its owners, or a set number of users such as SME’s can post focused messages such as instructions, important content or updates for the team to consume. We may simply want a proportion of the team to observe others conversations. We may simply want it for announcements, or to lock down the channel for bots or connectors such as Twitter and Yammer. Whatever the use case, the moderation of Teams channels is about choice as much as it is about good governance as we now have the ability to have very focused channel communications – a very good thing for us all.
WHY WOULD WE DO IT?
- To specify who can post in a channel
- To make channel communications more focused
- To lock down channel posting for bots and connectors
PREREQUISITES
The following is required
- Teams Licence
Within Office/Microsoft 365. The user needs to be an owner of a Team.
HOW
1.) Log into Teams (Desktop or Web)
2.) Select ellipsis (…) next to the Channel to apply moderation to
3.) Select Manage Channel
4.) Even without moderation, the ability to restrict guests is possible. Change channel moderation from Off to On
5.) In this example, as well as the Team Owners, we’ll also select Lidia Holloway who is the organisations SME to be permitted to post in the channel. Select Manage
6.) Add the user and select Done
7.) Now the user has been added, check/uncheck whether members can reply to posts and whether bots or connectors can submit channel messages
Our work here is done. No saving required.
Per settings, only Owners, Lidia Holloway the SME and connectors will be able to post to the channel. This works on both public and private teams.
THE GENERAL CHANNEL EXCEPTION
The noticeable exception to the above is with the Teams general channel. Currently, it is only possible to show alerts before posting, or restricted to Owners.
Hopefully, the general channel will align to all other channels in the future
