Moderating Teams Channels

Working with Moderated Channels in Teams:

Beside of the upcoming Private Channels, in Teams you can control channel and messaging/ collaboration in multiple ways.

The optimal control what a channel shall be for, is found under Managing Channel. You want to be able in the sense of Teams Adoption controlling (other words: optimizing) collaboration. 

A channel can have multiple functions:

•  Information Channel
•  Information Channel with dedicated feedback
•  Moderated Channel
•  Controlling behavior of Guest
•  BOT or CONNECTOR controlled

Those options provide us with a greater flexibility in optimization of Teams Usage.

It will drive best user experience and archive an optimal approach for Business Processes and Information Flow within a Collaboration Platform.

First you have to create a channel within the Team:

After its creation, select the Manage channel option.

The configuration windows start with controlling Guest behavior. You can restrict Guest from starting proactively a conversation.

Next, if you turn "Channel Moderation" ON:

•  Teams Owner are activated posting in this channel, while members can reply and  bot/ connector can submit messages.

If you turn of Team member permission:

•  Team members are only observer (information channel)
•  control BOTs and Connector if messaging is possible/ or not

If you hover of the "Teams owners" a popup shows you who are the automatically added Teams owner.

Managing Moderator is limited on the list of Teams members/ owner:

It is possible nominating Guest as moderator too. 

Example:

If a you have a Project Management Team, where the PM is external (Guest), this is one option where it makes sense.

If a user isn't part of the members of a team, search will not bring up any results and the user can't be added. You would have first making this user part of the members.

Advice for User Adoption:

In the following examples, will hopefully give you ideas on how to use moderated channels and help you driving optimized collaboration, reducing other "outside" Teams workloads, like SharePoint, or Yammer.

Information Channel:

At channel level, where you like to publish information only, you should define a moderator and restrict postings. You can enable Replys on those messages, depending on who and what those information are for.

Functional Channel: (e.g. TABs)

You might have written BOTs, specialized TABs or other functional events. In this case the might be no collaboration based on messaging necessary. At those circumstances, you can leave the chat section "closed", focusing on the other features you have deployed within the channel.

Moderated Channel: (Compliance Control)

If you, e.g. have a management board channel, you want to control this channel and ensure compliance or behavioral policies. In those cases a moderated channel might help.