When using Microsoft Teams as your communication platform, there may be a requirement to customise what your employees can and cannot do in a specific team and/or a specific channel. For example, if you have an organisation-wide team for Communication, and you might have channels underneath that team for CEO announcements, compliance updates and general news.
You might want to have your CEO announcement channel as “read only” for staff, so it is kept to CEO communications only, and not filled with general staff conversations.
To do this, I need to be the owner of a Team. If I am the owner of the team, I can click on the 3 dots next to the channel I wish to customise, and then click on manage channel.
In the manage channel settings, I can set the permissions and choose who can post messages. Make sure you turn the channel moderation to on. From there I can choose Team Moderators; in most cases the moderators are set to the Team Owners and only allow those people to post new messages.
Looking at the Team Member permission tick boxes, you can decide if you want to allow team members to reply to messages. I would recommend keeping that on if you want users to reply to posts and provide feedback. If you want to prevent this, then make sure the box is unticked.
You have some other options to allow bots or connectors to send messages into the channel. Bots can be set up to post proactive messages into a channel automatically. Make sure this is unticked if you don’t want any bots to post messages. Connectors can be used to post scheduled messages to a channel for example a news post each week or a daily twitter feed. Again make sure this options is unticked to prevent connectors from posting. Bots and connectors need to be set up in the Team beforehand, so if you don’t have any bots or connectors, you don’t need to worry about unticking the settings.
You don’t need to click “save”, the changes will work as soon as you set them, so you can now click back into your channel and your settings will apply.
Check out my quick YouTube how-to-video on customising channel permissions.
Collab with Kat 