Why you should never mess with Private and Shared Channel SharePoint Sites

I recently worked with a client, where I assisted with building an Intranet. I helped create a Hub and made the homepage pretty (using only OOTB features, of course). Then, they asked me to connect some existing sites to the Intranet Hub. Despite the sites being active SharePoint sites, I could not find them in the SharePoint Admin Center. I knew something was fishy here, but the lightbulb went off when I looked at the URLs of the sites. They all had dashes in them. At that moment, I realized that these were not regular team sites but were created by the Private and Shared channels in Teams.

Despite the appeal of using these sites and connecting those sites to the Intranet, this is not something you can actually do or should even consider doing. So, I would like to summarize several reasons why you should not use these sites for anything other than file storage for private and shared channels.

Reason # 1: Auto-created sites

The first reason is the nature of these sites. As documented in this post, the whole purpose of these SharePoint sites is to store files securely for Private and Shared Channels. The fact that they are usually mostly accessible from the Teams interface means that these sites are meant to be create-and-forget types.

Reason # 2: Permissions Management

The other big reason for not using these sites for anything else is the fact that you can’t manage permissions on those sites like you can on normal sites. If you try to do so, you will get an error message.

This is because permissions are controlled from Teams apps when you add/remove users to the channel.

Reason # 3: Can’t connect to the Hub

The other reason (that prompted me to write this post) is that you can’t connect the sites to the Hub. You can connect the parent Team Site to the Hub, but not individual channel sites. Ironically, you can convert a Team into a hub, and it will connect the channel sites to the Hub.

Reason # 4: Can’t share site externally

This is kind of related to Reason # 2 – Permission management. If you decide at some point to share the site created by private or shared channels externally, you will not be able to do so. While you can enable external sharing on a SharePoint site within the SharePoint Admin Center, you can’t do this to Private or Shared sites. To be precise here, there are ways to do so, but they come with important nuances and limitations:

1. If you need to share the entire Private Channel Site externally, you would need to invite an external user to the entire team and then invite that external user as a member of a Private Channel
2. If you need to share the entire Shared Channel Site externally, your IT department would need to set up B2B direct connections for each organization with which you want to collaborate.

It is important to note that while you can’t share entire sites (created by those channels) externally, users can still share individual files and folders externally.