Teams Pinned Channels Highlight Favorite Discussions

Highlight Important Channels Above Teams List

Office 365 Notification MC190856 brings the news that Teams supports the ability to “pin” channels to the top of the Teams list. The new feature is described in Office 365 roadmap item 55369. The new feature is now rolling out to Office 365 tenants and Microsoft says that the deployment will be complete worldwide by the end of October 2019.

Pinning a channel currently works for the Teams desktop and browser clients. The feature is also available in the mobile Teams client. Both tenant and guest users can pin channels and, as you’d expect, the pinned channel list is unique to a tenant.

Simple Idea, Simple to Pin

The idea is simple: some channels are more important than others. In fact, some channels hold information that might be critical to the work someone does. It’s easy to lose sight of a channel if you belong to a large set of teams, each of which has several channels. Your activity feed might be swamped with the debris generated by multiple chatty channels and the notifications you create for channels might result in barrage of banner notifications. The solution is to allow users identify which are their important channels and then pin those channels to a prominent spot on top of the Teams list (Figure 1).

The name of the team it belongs to appears under each pinned channel, and if the channel name is bold (see First Edition above), you know that it has some new content.

Pinned channels are listed in the order they are pinned. If you don’t like the order, you can drag and drop pinned channels within the list to create your preferred order.

Pinning a Channel

You can pin a channel in any team, whether it’s in the “Your teams” or “Hidden teams” list. Once you’ve found a channel to pin, click the […] menu and select Pin (Figure 2).

To unpin a channel, select it in the pinned list, click […] and select Unpin.

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