Teams Adds Moderation for Channel Conversations

Another Email Feature Added to Teams

Moderation is a well-known feature of email systems to control messages posted to sensitive mailboxes or distribution lists. For instance, you can enforce moderation on the CEO’s mailbox so that all messages must be checked by their assistant before delivery. Announced on July 19 in Office 365 Message Center notification MC186219 (Roadmap item 51786), Teams now supports the same kind of capability for channel conversations. Microsoft has started to roll-out moderation for Teams and the deployment should be complete across Office 365 worldwide in August.

Use Case for Moderation

Moderation is likely to be used in channels used to announce information rather than for general discussion. For example, you might want to dedicate a channel in a team used to co-ordinate the development of a new product to announce when new builds are available and don’t want to clutter up the channel with random unrelated conversations. Some might be disappointed that moderation is limited to restricting posts and doesn’t include functionality like selecting posts to highlight or pinning those posts to the top of the channel, but if you compare it to moderation for a distribution group or mailbox, the implementation in Teams makes sense.

Moderation is available for both public and private teams.

Adding Moderation to a Channel

To enable moderation, select the channel you want to control and then Manage channel from the […] menu. You can then turn moderation on or off for the channel. Even if moderation is disabled, you still have the option to restrict the creation of new topics (posts) to any member of the team or everyone except guests (Figure 1).

If you enable moderation for a channel, the next step is to decide who the moderators should be (Figure 2). By default, all team owners are moderators, but you can select a different set of owners and members to act as moderators.

Finally, you can control if members can reply to posts and if automated processes (bots and connectors) can submit messages to the channel. An example of where you would enable these types of posts is where you connect the channel to something like Visual Studio to get updates about product builds.

After moderation is enabled, members who aren’t moderators cannot create new conversations in the channel and will see an informational banner saying “only channel moderators can post in this channel.” Depending on the settings, they might be able to reply.

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