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Channel Management – Helping you handle Microsoft Teams and Channels effectively throughout your project lifecycle

Have you ever experienced the frustration of dealing with the mess that Microsoft Teams can become? Too many Teams, duplicate channels, an abundance of clutter, wrong permissions… and the list goes on. 

In this article, we explore how AGAT’s Channel Management tool for MS Teams puts you back in the driving seat. Companies all over the world are using the Channel Management tool to keep their work environment organized and aligned to their needs.

Table of contents:

Collaborating in MS Teams and its limitations

AGAT’s Solution

1- Move Channels

2- Merge Channels

3- Change the Private or Public status of Channels

4- Archive Channels

5- Export Channels

Collaborating in MS Teams and its limitations

As of 2020, more than 1,000,000 organizations worldwide use Microsoft Teams as their collaboration and teamwork tool, and every organization needs its Teams environment to reflect the dynamic nature of business processes.

It would be very difficult to find a single company that maintains a static structure from the beginning, without the need for optimizations, merges, or any changes arising as they work and their projects evolve.

Despite that, and the fact that users keep asking for a solution, Microsoft does not offer the ability to restructure Teams to accommodate this reality.  Companies can quickly find themselves with a cluttered platform, having added too many Teams and channels they no longer use and should be modified to reflect their current structure.

AGAT’s Solution

AGAT’s SphereShield allows users to keep up with the rhythm of their organization and move things around in just a few clicks.

Let’s take for example an organization that’s working on the development of a new software product. These projects are often fast-paced, and the handling of each one of their features is switched between teams depending on the stage of its lifecycle. 

How could SphereShield’s Channel Management help them along the way?

1- Move Channels

By moving channels between teams, users can avoid having to make new ones and keep old ones for their content. They can move all sections, pages, text, and images.

In our example, this could mean that if the design team has matured one feature and is ready to send it to the Dev Team, they can move the Channel with all the info they’ll need.

move channels with channel management, a screen mockup

2- Merge Channels

As they keep working, the Team finds that they split the development of some new features into multiple channels. Then, they realize they want to manage them as pieces of one, bigger feature. Given this, they could merge those channels and keep all the info in the same place.

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3- Change the Private or Public status of Channels

Let’s say the Design Team started a public channel and realized later that they were accumulating lots of sensitive information.

Changing a Channel from Public to private is not a native option in MS Teams.  SphereShield users can achieve this easily. First, create a new empty channel that is private. Then, merge the old public channel into the new private one. That’s it, a  status change in two simple steps.

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4- Archive Channels

SphereShield can help you keep Microsoft Teams uncluttered, without inactive channels hanging around, and without losing data. Keeping channels from accumulating is also crucial because there is a 200 channel limit for every Team. Private channels are limited to 30 per Team. 

When the Team finishes their project, they will be able to archive all the channels related to it. This way, users will be able to keep the content and also retrieve it for future projects.

To do this, SphereShield creates a special Team named “Archive” to which the old inactive channels get sent. 

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5- Export Channels

Microsoft doesn’t offer a simple way to copy and paste all the content from a channel. 

If the workgroup needs to share information through other channels or store it outside the Teams environment, SphereShield allows them to export all the data from a channel to an unchangeable PDF format.

To get a free trial of SphereShield’s channel contact us today. Our sales team will contact you with all the information you need.

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Microsoft Teams Channel Management How To

How to Make a Public Microsoft Teams Channel Private

change teams channel from private to public: Microsoft Teams is without a doubt one of the top collaboration platforms out there. Their users love hosting meetings and its deep integrations with other Microsoft products for intuitive collaboration.

One of the issues that usually comes around is that companies start using it without having a good notion of how MS Teams should be used. It’s very common to find what we call “team and channel cluttering” with too many teams and channels. A common question we get asked is how to convert public channels to private

how to change teams channel from private to public

Use cases for converting a public channel to private

There are many reasons why someone would like to make a public channel become private. But usually, the case is when channels start storing more and more sensitive information in a way that could be risky for other users to see. In that case instead of deleting the information, companies want to restrict access to very specific users and keep the conversation history, files and other tabs there.

How to Change a Microsoft Teams Channel from public to private.

As many of the User Voice members understand, converting a public channel to private is not supported yet. The good news is that SphereShield Channel Management can do this very easily, and much more. It just takes a few steps. To Change a channel from private to public:

  1. In Microsoft Teams, create an empty channel with a very similar name
  2. Go to the Microsoft Teams management console
  3. Click ‘Manage’ next to the Team to present a list of Channels within the Team.
  4. Select the Channel you 
  5. Select the Microsoft Teams private channel you want to convert and click ‘Merge’ from the available actions
  6. Select the destination team and then the destination channel. In this case it will be the same team, and the channel you created in step 1 (You can easily do it for another team). After that click ‘Continue’

last thought about change teams channel from private to public

And it’s done! You’ll see a confirmation message saying that it’s in process and could take a few minutes. You will be notified when the operation was completed. It can take around 20 minutes to complete (depending on how much content is within the channel you are moving)

change teams channel from private to public?
Microsoft Teams Channel Management FAQs
Need to convert a public channel to private?

teams change channel from private to public
teams change channel from private to public
change teams channel from private to public
change teams channel from private to public
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how to make a teams channel private after creation

more data related to how to make a teams channel private after creation

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft Teams: capabilities and limitations

SphereShield Now Offers Archive, Move and Export for Microsoft Teams

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Microsoft Teams Channel Management

Moving a Channel in Microsoft Teams: How to do it?

Why do so many people need to move channels in Microsoft Teams? Is there any solution for this? Why would I, an MS Teams user, need to do this? 

In this post, we will try to answer all these questions and give some more data about this often requested functionality for Microsoft Teams. You will learn everything related to how to move a channel in Microsoft Teams.

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Introduction: The elephant in the (chat) room

Microsoft Teams could arguably be the most popular Unified Communications platform in the market. It’s competitors constantly try to copy and outrank the amount of features. The reasons for its success are beyond the scope of this post, but it’s clear that when a software platform becomes that popular, the demand for more advanced features starts making a lot of noise.

Microsoft Uservoice is a platform that in a smart way joins together hundreds of suggestions for improvements to the platform, the user experience and functionalities.

Some time ago we noticed that there was a post mentioning the need to move Channels between Teams. This was already within the top 5 requests. Fast forward to today and we are still counting more than 27,000 votes (which is a lot) and more than 166 pages of people commenting how badly they need this feature.

That is the elephant in the room, a request that is more than 3 years old and has reached the top of the requests for MS Teams.

How to move channels between teams, and why?

Before we get to the how, let’s dedicate a few words to explain why someone would  need to move a channel.

The underlying assumption is that usually channels stay where they are and in the worst case scenario, someone will create a new channel in another team and start things over.

The reality is far beyond that assumption. Channels sometimes contain hundreds of lines of conversations and files. There is  a wiki for knowledge and many other tabs offering a vast array of functionality and integration. It’s just not practical to tell someone to forgo that channel and start a new one.

Back to our main question – how can you move channels in Microsoft Teams?

There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that it’s still not possible to do this on the Microsoft Teams app. But there’s nothing to be desperate about! The good news is that AGAT Software has been offering for the last months a product called Channel Management that does precisely that and even more: You can move, merge, copy, archive and export channels.

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SphereShield Channel Management for Microsoft Teams provides options to move a channel, copy, archive, merge and export

SphereShield Channel Management for Microsoft Teams exporting a channel to PDF
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SphereShield Channel Management for Microsoft Teams provides an audit to see whether people moved channels and when.

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With SphereShield Channel Management for Microsoft Teams, you can move multiple channels at once

Why is it so important? What are the use cases for Moving Teams Channels?

There are many uses for creating channels. Sometimes they can be associated with a particular project,  customer or a recurring task. The possibilities are endless.

Imagine a company that associates a channel with a prospect called “compunet”. They create the channel on the sales team, where they share proposals, emails, spreadsheets. Once the deal is closed, they want to have the channel “compunet” under the customer support team in order to deal with any kind of issues that “compunet” could have.

The same can be said about a project, that goes from the planning team, to the development team, to the finance team… etc.

To put it in simple terms, people need software to offer flexible usage that can adapt and evolve to the business needs.

If a platform remains rigid in terms of functionality, it creates friction and makes processes harder. In a way of a parable, it is like having a pen and paper but no way to erase it. On one hand it will write, on the other hand it won’t be able to handle the simple issue of a correction.

What are the ways of getting SphereShield Channel Management.


Getting SphereShield Channel Management is a simple process. When contacting our sales team, they will provide all the necessary information.or customers who are interested, they can have a free live demo to test it before making any decisions. 

Contact Us Today to get SphereShield Channel Management.