In May 2019, Microsoft posted Office 365 Notification MC180213 to tell tenants that a refreshed version of the Teams Files Channel tab was rolling out (the new tab was also featured at the SharePoint North America conference that month). The Files channel tab is the interface between Teams and SharePoint Online and it’s an important part of the Teams collaboration story. Tenants expected to see the new tab in June 2019, but it never showed up. Microsoft isn’t saying why the tab was delayed so much, but the need to improve performance might be the reason why.
Figure 1: The old Teams Files Channel tab experience
New Files Channel Tab
The new experience delivers a Files channel tab (Figure 2) with more functionality. You’re able to pin documents to the top of a folder and use features like check-out and check-in. Unlike the old tab, the view is customizable. In Figure 2 you can see that I’ve added columns to display retention labels and sensitivity labels (still in preview for SharePoint Online) and that values for these labels appear in the view. You can also see that a date column is formatted using colors.
Figure 3: Creating a link to a Teams channel folder
The type of
links that can be created depend on the organization’s sharing policy for SharePoint
Online, and include:
Anyone with
the link (Anonymous sharing). This type of link will expire if the organization
configures a link expiration period for anyone links. You can set a password
for the link so that those who try to use it must also know the password, and
you can set the link to allow editing.
People in your organization. The link can be read-only or allow editing.
People with existing access (like team members). These people use the access they already have to
work with the content in the folder.
Specific people. You enter the email addresses of the people you want to allow access
to the folder. You can make the access read-only or allow editing.
After you create
a link, you can copy it to the clipboard and share it with intended recipients
using Teams or email.
What’s Missing in the New Tab
Mostly when I work with SharePoint Online, I use the browser
interface. The Teams channel tab is fine for day-to-day work, but I miss a
couple of features that I use extensively.
You can’t access the version history of a document.
You can’t edit the properties of a document to assign a retention label or update custom properties.
You can’t share an individual document. Maybe it’s an attempt to force people to share documents in chats or channel conversations, but that’s a warped perspective because most Office 365 (and other) users don’t use Teams.
The easy workaround is to use the Open in SharePoint option to perform these and other actions, like access to Power Automate (Flow) and Power Apps. Although I understand why the Teams developers have chosen to keep the tab simpler and less cluttered than the SharePoint interface, I’m sure there will be some who are disappointed that the new channel tab is not equivalent to what’s available in SharePoint.
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wow thats so cool so this is the web sites my teacher was talking about in my meeting we had yesterday?