Overview

In a world that is interconnected, organizations need to freely collaborate across boundaries, because connections with partners, vendors, and customers have always been very critical for any business to succeed. In addition to that, more than ever before, the need to collaborate with external partners in Teams with the same ease and efficiency that you would normally collaborate within your own company employees has also become very important. The old model simply will not work for the new business needs because time is key for any business to succeed. So, we need a solution that is secure, governable, compliant and most of all something that overcomes the challenges that we had in the past. So, Microsoft Teams Connect brought that dream to reality. In this blog post we will discuss about what is Microsoft Teams connect shared channels, how to set it up and how to securely collaborate using shared channels.

For demo purpose, we would be using two users here who belongs to two different tenants.

Tenant 1:

Domain – vigneshganesan.com

User – vijaianand@vigneshganesan.com

Tenant 2:

Domain – vigneshcloud.com

User – vijai@vigneshcloud.com

In Tenant 1, user will create a shared channel and share it with Tenant 2 user. Tenant 2 user can access the Tenant 1 shared channel without switching the organization in Microsoft Teams.

Topics covered

This article demonstrates how to enable and seamlessly collaborate using Teams shared channel by following the six steps given below.

• Enable shared channels in Teams Admin Center
• Enable external access to users
• Enable shared channels with all external organizations
• Create Shared Channel in Teams
• Share the channel with external user
• Access the shared channel

Pre-requisites

1. Global administrator or Security administrator role in the respective tenant.
2. Global administrator or Teams administrator role in the respective tenant.

Step 1: Enable shared channels in Teams Admin Center

In this step, you will see how to enable shared channels in Teams Admin Center. This step must be performed in both the tenants (Tenant 1 & Tenant 2).

Note: By default, this option is enabled in Teams Admin Center.

1. Open browser and navigate to Teams Admin Center.
2. In the left navigation, expand Teams and click Teams Policies.
3. Click the Teams policy for which you want to enable shared channels, turn on the shared channels and click Apply. The following options are available as part of shared channel.

Create Shared Channels – Team owners can create shared channels for people within and outside the organization. Only people added to the shared channel can read and write messages.

Invite external users to shared channels – Owners of a shared channel can invite external users to join the channel, if Azure AD external sharing policies are configured. If the channel has been shared with an external member or team, they will continue to have access to the channel even if this control is turned off.

Join external shared channels – Users and teams can be invited to external shared channels, if Azure AD external sharing policies are configured. If a team in your organization is part of an external shared channel, new team members will have access to the channel even if this control is turned off.

Step 2: Enable external access to users

In this step, you will see how to enable external access to users so that they can participate in external meetings and to see external participants’ presence in the channel. This step needs to be performed in both the tenants (Tenant 1 & Tenant 2).

1. Open browser and navigate to Teams Admin Center.
2. In the left navigation, expand Users and click External access.
3. Under Teams and Skype for Business users in external organizations section, select Allow all external domains option from the dropdown.

Step 3: Enable shared channels with all external organizations

In this step, you will see how to enable shared channels with all external organizations access to users so that they can participate in external meetings and to see external participants’ presence in the channel. To achieve this, B2B direct connect default settings should be changed to allow all organizations. This step needs to be performed in both the tenants (Tenant 1 & Tenant 2).

Note: We can allow access to specific organizations also.

1. Open browser and navigate to Azure Active Directory.
2. In the left navigation, click External Identities -> Cross-tenant access settings -> Default settings-> Inbound access settings-> Edit inbound defaults.

• Click B2B direct connect ->External users and groups -> select Allow access.

• Click Applications-> select Allow access. Click Save.

• In the left navigation, click Cross-tenant access settings -> Default settings-> Outbound access settings-> Edit outbound defaults.

• Click B2B direct connect -> Users and groups -> select Allow access.

• Click External Applications-> select Allow access. Click Save.

Note: Changes to cross-tenant access settings may take up to six hours to take effect.

Step 4: Create Shared Channel in Teams

In this step, you will see how to create a shared channel in Microsoft Teams app. This step needs to be performed by the user in Tenant 1.

1. Open Microsoft Teams.
2. Navigate to the Team where you need to create the shared channel, click more options (…) and then click Add Channel.

• Enter the channel name, select Shared option from Privacy drop down and click Create.

Step 5: Share Channel with external users

In this step, you will see how to share channel with external users. This step needs to be performed by Tenant 1 user.

1. Open Microsoft Teams.
2. Navigate to the shared channel, click more options (…) -> Share Channel-> With people.

• Enter the email address of the user and click Share.

• Click Close.

Step 6: Access the shared channel

In this step, you will see how to access the shared channel without switching the organizations in Microsoft Teams. This step needs to be performed by the Tenant 2 user.

1. Open Microsoft Teams.
2. Login using Tenant 2 user.
3. You can view the shared channel in Teams as shown below without switching the organization.

Summary

So finally in this blog post we saw how to enable Teams shared channel as an admin and how your users can share the channel with external participants so that they can access the content in the shared channel without switching the organization in Microsoft Teams.

India Cloud Security Summit, 2022 is a one-day free virtual event organized by the Microsoft 365, Power Platform & Cloud Security India User group. This year’s event was held virtually on Oct 29th, 2022 and was organized by the Microsoft community members – Vignesh Ganesan, Jasjit Chopra, Narasima Perumal Chandramohan, Shrushti Shah, & Mythili Ranganathan. In this year’s event we focussed on Cloud Security topics related to Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Endpoint security. This is the second Cloud Security event from the Microsoft Community in India followed by the first one which we had on August 2021.This event had close to 50 sessions with three different tracks and we had speakers from different parts of the world who joined virtually and shared their knowledge and expertise on various Microsoft Cloud Security services. Our speakers line up included Microsoft MVPs and RDs, Microsoft engineering and Sales team members, Industry leaders and Cybersecurity experts.

We had close to 1200 registrations and 300 live attendees for this event. If you missed the sessions, then please use the link below to view all the session recordings and please to subscribe to this YouTube channel without fail to view all our session recordings.

Also,if you’re not a member of the Microsoft365,Power Platform and Cloud Security India meetup group then please use the link below to become a member so that you can be a part of all our events.

Microsoft365,Power Platform and Cloud Security India user group : https://www.meetup.com/Microsoft-365-and-Power-Platform-User-group-India/