Teams Shared Channels Overview

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

This article is intended to give an overview of the Teams shared channels functionality for NHS.net Connect users and Local Administrators.

Please note:

A NHS.net Connect Portal release on 3rd April 2024 has delivered some new functionality for Teams shared channels. If you have previously enabled your organisation for Teams shared channels, please read this article to understand how the recent changes affect you.

What are Teams shared channels?

Teams ‘shared’ channels are a new type of channel that complement the two existing types of Teams channels, ‘standard’ and ‘private’, but have slightly different capabilities.

Shared channels in Microsoft Teams create collaboration spaces in which you can invite colleagues inside and outside of NHS.net Connect to chat and collaborate on documents.

People outside of the NHS.net Connect tenant can participate in a shared channel without switching profiles, so Teams groups and shared channels can be viewed and accessed in the same place.

A shared channel functions like any other channel within a Teams site, so users can seamlessly chat, store, edit and collaborate on documents and files held within the shared channel.

When to use Teams shared channels?

Shared channels can be used to manage a set of individuals within or outside of a team or tenant. You can use shared channels to collaborate with people within NHS.net Connect and people outside of NHS.net Connect that have been approved for shared channels collaboration.

What are the benefits of using Teams shared channels?

Shared channels in Teams enable NHS.net Connect organisations and approved external partners to work together in a shared space, have conversations, share and co-author files and collaborate without needing to switch tenants. Shared channels allow users to share and access resources, chat and see contact information in a similar way to how users interact with internal users in a shared collaboration space, increasing the ease of live document collaboration and improving inter-organisation collaboration. Shared channels create an easily accessible shared document storage space, reducing over-sharing and team proliferation.

How do Teams shared channels work?

The Teams shared channels functionality for NHS.net Connect allows users from an external partner organisation to easily collaborate with NHS.net Connect users. Once the user’s account has been invited and directly added to the shared channel, they can collaborate in the channel without the need to switch tenants.

Please see below guidance on:

• How to enable shared channels for collaboration with a new external organisation, not already configured for shared channels
• How to enable shared channels for collaboration with a pre-onboarded external organisation, already configured for shared channels
• How to enable shared channels for collaboration with internal NHS.net Connect users

How to collaborate with a new external organisation?

The process to request the enablement of shared channels with a new external organisation (domain) is administered via the Helpdesk Self-Service (HSS) route. An NHS.net Connect organisation’s Local Administrators can create a new HSS request to configure shared channels, amend an existing configuration, or delete a domain. When requesting to configure a new domain, NHS.net Connect organisations and the external partner organisations will need to meet the necessary pre-requisites and follow the relevant governance process to enable the shared channel functionality. Once the governance process and the configuration with the NHS.net Connect tenant has been completed, shared channels can be enabled for seamless collaboration.

How to collaborate with a pre-onboarded external organisation?

NHS.net Connect organisations looking to collaborate with third party domains already configured with the NHS.net Connect tenant and want to allow users to join shared channels hosted under the internal NHS.net Connect tenant may do so through the assignment of the Teams shared channel policies. Local Administrators can apply shared channel policies at user level via the NHS.net Connect Portal. This means that access can be restricted to the required users within an organisation. This allows for immediate collaboration with the onboarded domains without the need to go via the HSS onboarding route.

There are 5 policy options, each representing a different level of permissions which Local Administrators can assign via the NHS.net Connect Portal.

NHS.net Connect organisations looking to collaborate with third party domains already configured with the NHS.net Connect tenant and want to allow users to join shared channels hosted by external organisations must submit a new HSS request to ensure the relevant outbound traffic groups are correctly configured.

How to collaborate with internal NHS.net Connect users?

Shared channels can also be used to collaborate with other internal NHS.net Connect users. Instead of using a standard or a private channel, shared channels can be used to provide other NHS.net Connect users access to only a particular channel within a Teams group, without providing access to the rest of the documents and information stored in the Teams group.

NHS.net Connect organisations looking to use shared channels to collaborate with internal NHS.net Connect users may do so through the assignment of one of the following Teams shared channel policies: “All Shared Channel Features” or “Inviter Only”. Local Administrators can apply these shared channel policies at user level via the NHS.net Connect Portal. This allows for immediate collaboration with any pre-onboarded external organisations and all internal NHS.net Connect users.

Where can I find more information?

If you are a user wishing to take advantage of the Teams shared channels functionality to better collaborate with users from an external organisation or other internal NHS.net Connect users, please contact your Local Administrator to discuss your requirements.

If you are a Local Administrator looking to onboard your organisation, please refer to the Teams Shared Channels LA Guide.