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Archive Teams Channels Rather Than Keep Them Around
Microsoft 365 message center notification MC696576 (last updated 16 Feb 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 123769) announced a new feature to archive teams channels. This is part of a Microsoft effort to emphasize channels and to encourage people to use channels for collaboration instead of rushing to create new teams and avoid the plague of teams sprawl. The lack of a Teams directory becomes more evident as time passes.
Initiatives such as adding shared channels to Teams and increasing the number of channels supported by an individual team to 1,000 (a mixture of regular, private, and shared channels) are pointers to the direction Microsoft is heading in to constrain the growth of teams and to encourage people to make better use of existing teams.
Archive Teams Channel in the Client
Teams reached general availability in early 2017. Since then, it’s obvious that a fair amount of debris has accumulated in the form of unused (and possibly unwanted) channels. Up to now, team owners have been able to archive complete teams using the Manage Teams option in the client (alternative methods to archive groups and teams also exist), but it hasn’t been possible to archive selected channels.
Microsoft is rolling the archive channel option (Figure 1) to targeted release tenants. Standard release tenants will see the option at the end of February 2024 with the intention to complete worldwide deployment by mid-March 2024.
Team (or channel owners for shared channels) can archive channels (except the General channel, but you can hide the General channel). When a channel is archived, it is removed from the channel list and it is no longer possible to post new messages to the channel, react to or edit messages, and so on. Optionally, the owner can make the folder in the SharePoint Online site read-only (Figure 2) to stop team members updating files or uploading new files to the folder. Team owners and administrators continue to have access to archived channels and can upload or amend content as necessary.
Use Case for Archived Channels
The Office 365 for IT Pros team uses Teams to coordinate the updating and production of monthly updates for the eBook. We have channels going back to the fourth edition (2018). This is a good use case for the archive channel option because we are now working on the tenth edition and the channels supporting the production of the six previous editions are not in active use. It makes total sense to archive these channels to preserve their content and put them in an inert but accessible state.
PowerShell Access for Archived Teams Channels
Currently, the PowerShell cmdlets that list teams channels from the Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK modules do not distinguish archived channels. For instance, here’s how to list the channels in a team:
Get-MgChannel -TeamId $TeamId | Format-table Id, displayName Id DisplayName -- ----------- 19:0571b31b8d1b4bd0b31e4069743b9d35@thread.skype General 19:216807403e6d4875b93769b1e66dfe66@thread.skype 2024 Edition (10th) 🐘 19:3d3703b0a6334fb3b9031d6b5a09b222@thread.skype 😂Office 365 for IT Pros RSS 19:3f176f2065974b73a61c2f58b4acb2e1@thread.skype 2020 Edition 19:51d90f314eed461a8752696cc481d89e@thread.skype Stream Videos 19:70f50daaed274ba18ac647fe9cb6cd06@thread.skype Fifth Edition 19:f15426f0bd2545df87aa70bf233c5615@thread.skype 2022 Edition 19:f2cb1f5540f54e06b7a45e90af446ebb@thread.skype 🏴☠️2023 Edition (9th) 19:fb859e8c24aa484da127ef701cf1cde0@thread.skype Fourth Edition 19:fc327ce8623247eb9867798af13faff9@thread.skype 2021 Edition 19:mGFq7X0e6cG97Z7kUN0PsIj0ZMRPynjo2wA4AwusxoI1@thread.skype Office 365 for IT Pros 2023 Edition
No trace exists that any of these channels are archived (two are). The ability to distinguish between active and archived channels is likely to come in future releases of the PowerShell modules.
Archive Teams Channels is a Good Idea
All computer systems accumulate some debris over time. Clearing out old stuff to focus on the new, useful, and active material makes good sense. Microsoft is focusing on channel management to keep Teams tidy through features like hiding the General channel and archiving channels. It makes sense to run a tidy and managed environment. Archiving team channels helps in that aim, especially in an era when a team can support up to 1,000 channels.
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