Shared channels in Microsoft Teams create collaboration spaces for people inside and outside your team or organisation. They offer a seamless and improved version of collaboration with those inside and outside of the NHSmail central tenant, helping to extend teamwork effectively and efficiently across organisational boundaries.

Following the October 2023 release of NHSmail Teams shared channels functionality, a NHSmail Portal release on 3rd April 2024 has delivered some new functionality for Teams shared channels. This article is intended to give an update to Local Administrators who have previously onboarded their organisations for shared channels before 3rd April 2024.

What is new?

New user level controls are now available for Teams shared channels. With this update, Local Administrators can now apply shared channel permissions via user policies within the NHSmail Portal. This enables users to immediately collaborate with any external organisations (domains) that have already been configured for shared channels found here and, in certain cases, internal NHSmail users, without the need to follow the Helpdesk Self-Service (HSS) onboarding route.

There are 5 shared channel policy options, each representing varied levels of sharing, inviting and joining permissions which Local Administrators can assign to users via the NHSmail Portal.

This provides Local Administrators with more granular control over their users’ permissions and allows Local Administrators to restrict shared channels access to the required users within an organisation.

A new shared channels report has also been introduced to provide a summary of the shared channel policies applied to users.

For more information, please refer to the Teams Shared Channels LA Guide article.

What do I need to do?

If your organisation was onboarded for shared channels before 3rd April 2024, Local Administrators should now assign shared channel policies via the NHSmail Portal to all of their users using Teams shared channels.

User level assignment via the NHSmail portal is the platform recommendation for assigning shared channel permissions moving forward, this being an improvement over the existing all user security group level configuration of all permissions ‘on’.

Local Administrators wishing to maintain their existing set-up should review the user policies their users belong to and select the “All Shared Channels Features” shared channel policy from the new dropdown.

Where can I find out more about Teams shared channels?

For more information, please refer to the additional guidance for Users and the guidance for Local Administrators.