Support for private channels is the number one requested feature on the user voice for Microsoft teams. Over 16000 votes have been made in an effort to get this feature implemented. The more interesting part in my mind is that there seems to be a strong divide between some of the experts of whether or not the feature should be implemented.
There have been a lot of interesting conversations on twitter around this topic.
This got me thinking. There really is no guidance that I have found on how to handle the situation other than create another team and limit the team members. This made sense until I discovered a feature solely on accident.
You can name group chats and pin them
The company I work for has been growing recently and we have implemented team leads for the various practices. I had happened to start a group chat with the team leads and by accident clicked on the little pencil next the people name.
And now low and behold we now have a group chat named team leads. With the core features of a team. Conversations, Files and Tabs.
Now I know what you might be thinking.. The conversation history thing in teams is just a long running list of my recent conversations this teams lead chat will just get lost after awhile.
Luckily enough we have the ability to pin chats.
Now that group chat will always be available at the top of the chat window. When you are done with your project or that group chat you can unpin in and it will be lost into your history to be recovered through search!
So now my take do we need Private Channels?! yeah but we should look to named grouped chats first.
Ion All the Things 
3 replies on “Quick thought on Private Channels in Microsoft Teams”
Thuis might workshop die chats, but what about the document part of the discussion? You dont want related documents scattered all over Onedrives?
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I think that will be dependent on what the use case is. Most people won’t know that when they upload a document to a group chat it is uploaded to their OneDrive and shared with the people of group chat. So to them the files are just in their group chat in teams.
From a governance perspective… Education and policies need be designed on when should a team be created vs when should you use a group chat.
Group chats is definitely not the solution to every scenario.
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