Collaborating with external clients, vendors, and business partners historically required adding them as guest users in Microsoft Teams. This workflow suffered from significant user friction, forcing participants to switch tenants in their Teams client and losing access to their primary organization’s chats and notifications. Shared Channels (powered by Microsoft Teams Connect and Microsoft Entra B2B Direct Connect) eliminate tenant switching entirely, allowing internal and external users to collaborate seamlessly within a single shared space directly inside their home tenant.
Shared Channels vs Standard and Private Channels
Microsoft Teams provides three channel architectures tailored for distinct privacy and collaboration scopes:
| Channel Type | Membership Scope | External Access Method | Tenant Switching Needed? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Channel | All team members have access. | Guest account in host tenant. | Yes |
| Private Channel | Restricted subset of team members. | Guest account in host tenant. | Yes |
| Shared Channel | Any user or team within or outside org. | B2B Direct Connect trust relationship. | No (Native in home tenant) |
Prerequisites: Configuring Entra B2B Direct Connect
Before users can share a channel with an external organization, the Microsoft 365 administrators of both organizations must configure mutual trust policies in the Microsoft Entra admin center:
- Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center as a Global Administrator or Security Administrator.
- Navigate to External Identities and select Cross-tenant access settings.
- Under Organizational settings, click Add organization and enter the tenant ID or primary domain of the external partner.
- Click on the newly added partner organization and configure two policies:
- Inbound access: Under B2B direct connect, grant permissions for external users or groups to access your shared channels. Under Trust settings, you can optionally trust their multi-factor authentication (MFA) claims.
- Outbound access: Under B2B direct connect, permit your internal users to be invited into the external partner’s shared channels.
Note: The external partner organization must mirror these inbound and outbound settings in their own Entra tenant to establish bidirectional communication.
Creating a Shared Channel in Microsoft Teams
Once cross-tenant trust is active, team owners can create a shared channel directly from the desktop or web client:
- In Microsoft Teams, navigate to the team where you want to host the channel.
- Click the More options (…) button next to the team name and select Add channel.
- Enter a descriptive channel name (e.g.,
Project-Titan-External). - Under Channel type, click the dropdown and choose Shared – People you choose from your org or other orgs have access.
- Check the box for Share this channel with everyone on the team if all existing internal team members should be granted automatic access, then click Create.
Inviting External Users and Managing Permissions
After channel creation, a membership invitation prompt appears:
- Type the full email address of the external partner (e.g.,
[email protected]). - Select their name from the directory lookup and click Share.
- The external user receives an invitation notification in their home Teams client. The shared channel appears directly in their native Teams list alongside their daily internal channels, marked with a distinctive linked-channel icon.
Managing Governance and Security
Each shared channel provisions a dedicated, isolated SharePoint Online site collection separate from the parent team’s SharePoint repository. This ensures that external channel members cannot browse unauthorized files stored in other channels of the parent team. Administrators can apply Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rules, retention policies, and eDiscovery holds across shared channels to maintain compliance and safeguard intellectual property.