Shared channels aren’t yet generally available. They are in customer preview. When last asked, Microsoft said that they’ll be available in early 2022. How early is the question.

I think different scenarios will exist for the two types of channels. Private channels are for specific users (tenant and guest), so you have precise control over who’s accessing the content. Shared channels use identities from other tenants, so the control is less precise, especially when access is granted to a team from another tenant. We’ll see how things work out when we have the GA code.

I’m wondering whether private channels stop being as useful once shared channels exist, if you can use them to specify membership as a subset of the team. What does a private channel give you that a shared one doesn’t – is that what you meant when you said above that you can only federate with other Teams orgs (not guests)? Does that mean that if you happen to have a channel that you wanted to use as a shared channel internally, you then can’t use it with guests as well?

Retention policies will also be interesting. Private channels create issues with our retention policies, preventing people from deleting folders unless each one is empty of files (you can’t just delete a whole tree). We have to temporarily exclude the team from the retention policy if people want to reorganise their folder structures. I’ll be interested to see whether shared channels also suffer from this oddity and how they behave.

You don’t necessarily need to answer any of these questions unless they are interesting, I’m sure I’ll be able to test this all out when I am able to start using shared channels. Not long now!

The general channel is a regular channel. It’s just treated differently in that you can’t remove the General channel. In effect, Teams expects that the General channel exists within a team.

Private and shared channels use dedicated SPO sites because of the need to assure privacy for the members of those channels. There’s really no other good way to deliver on this promise. Creating demarcations within a single SPO site means that site administrators have access to the complete site, which compromises the privacy of shared or private channel data.

Really I think there are 4 channels types and I’m probably splitting hairs but
1. General channel
2. Regular channel
3. private channel
4. Shared channel

General channel works differently than the Regular channel. I expected it to work the same according to the road map item but really that only is for the General channel.

The shared channel I think will be a good one since sometimes you want only certain people. The problem I don’t like is if it introduces another SP site. I don’t like that private channels create a whole new SP site. From the SP side and working I would want everything on one site that pertains to the subject but now there could be multiple SP sites connected to one team. Things could get lost. If you only stayed on teams then OK maybe different SP sites are fine. I like the ability to create a SP library or tab that is only open to certain users on that team. This way it stays on one site and you can still link it within the team but not have it as it’s own channel.

Julie