How to Change Permissions in Microsoft Teams Channels

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Channel Permissions: Admin vs Member Capabilities

You as the owner of a team have full access to all administrative and moderating functions. Here we are assuming that you have an admin account in Microsoft Teams, not just a member or guest account.

As the admin, you obviously have the power to create new standard and private channels, delete them, and make posts in those channels—you have the full range of motion!

But so do your non-admin team members. By default, team members have almost all the same permissions you do—they can post in any non-private channel and even create private channels without you.

And that’s a potential recipe for chaos—you probably don’t want 20 people in a team creating and deleting channels at will.

How to change channel permissions

So, to avoid a free-for-all and keep your team structure the way YOU need it, put on your boss hat and go to your team’s “More options” menu. From there, go to “Manage team” > “Settings”, and you can restrict pretty much any member and guest user function, such as creating new channels and adding tabs and apps.

By the way, guest users have no permissions by default other than the ability to write and respond to posts in channels, so if you want your guest users to create their own channels, you can give them access in the same “Settings” menu.

The changes you make from this menu will apply to ALL the channels in the team. If you want to tweak the permissions settings for just one channel, simply go to that channel’s “More options” menu > “Manage channel”.

From there, however, you’ll see that you can only change a few member capabilities, namely channel moderation.

How to use and change channel moderation

Channel moderators are the ones who can create new posts, control who can respond to messages, and add new moderators.

If you just created a new channel, everyone in it will be able to create new posts, which could escalate to a spammed group chat in no time. So if you think there are really only 1-2 people in a channel that should have the right to post, add them as moderators (as long as they’re already in that team).

For example, let’s say you want to assign one of your team members to be a moderator for the “Copywriting” channel in your team, because they are the head copywriter in the company and are more qualified than you to make announcements and lead the conversation in the channel.

Other users will still be able to reply to messages you and the other moderator send (but you can change that too in the channel’s settings as shown above).

The moderator can later let all users make posts in the channel if they want to have a whole-team discussion or brainstorm in the chat (although we strongly suggest using Meetings for that).

We hope you learned something new from this post! Share it with a colleague or on your social media platform if you know someone who uses Microsoft Teams channels.

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