Teams Supports Edits and Deletions of Multi-Channel Posts

Correct Errors and Remove Bad Multi-Channel Posts

Office 365 Notification MC203670 posted on February 12 tells us of some updated functionality for Teams cross-channel posts. The first iteration of multi-channel posts (Figure 1) in October 2019 allowed users to post a message to up to 50 channels. Each channel could add replies to the original post, but the replies were not synchronized to the team where the message was originally created.

The newly-announced update (Microsoft Roadmap item 60946) allows users to edit their multi-channel posts and to have those edits show up in all the target channels. The exception is that if you edit a multi-channel post, edits won’t appear in channels where members are not allowed to edit posts. If you try this, you’ll see the error in Figure 2.

Updating the Set of Channels for a Multi-Channel Post

In addition to editing text, users can add new channels to a multi-channel post and have the message appear in those channels. You can even take a message that is posted to a single channel and transform it into a multi-channel post. This can only be done for base topic messages (those that create a new conversation) and not for replies. In addition, if you update a topic to make it a multi-channel post, only the topic is posted to the additional channels. Any existing replies to the topic are not copied to those channels.

The author of a multi-channel post can also recall the post from a channel by removing that channel from the post. In fact, you can even edit a post and remove the channel the message originated from and the message will disappear from that channel. Replies to recalled messages are not removed from channels (Figure 3), which might confuse users a little. Unlike regular posts, Team owners can’t edit or delete multi-channel posts.

Finally, an author can delete a multi-channel post and remove it from all channels. In this case, any replies posted remain in channels, but the base note is inaccessible. You can’t undo the deletion of a base note.

Roll-out Happening Now

Microsoft is now rolling the updated cross-channel posting feature to Office 365 tenants and expect worldwide deployment to be completed in mid-March. The feature only applies to the Teams desktop and browser clients and isn’t available on mobile.

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Constant changes to applications like Teams are meat and drink to the Office 365 for IT Pros authors. We ingest, contemplate, and update our text as changes arrive and issue an updated book every month.