Microsoft Teams General channel settings

Recently I noticed a new settings in the Member permissions related to the Microsoft Teams General channel.

Compared to all other channels in Teams it looks like Team’s General channel is slightly different.

Microsoft General Channel operations

The General channel is more limited than other channels that have been created by users.

If we just look at the channel menu and compare them. Then General channel will give you the following options:

While the other channels give you a lot more. As you can see it is not possible to hide the general channel, and it is not possible to edit or delete the channel.

Microsoft Teams General Channel settings

In the past there were a lot of settings that you could select or deselect:

However nowadays this has been changed to:

So now it is possible to restrict the use of the Teams General channel.

So for some teams the general channel can be restricted to team owners who place team announcement in the Teams General Channel.

When the General channel has been restricted you will see the following “Only Owners can send messages to this channel”:

These settings are just relevant to posting messages so users can still upload documents.

Then there is one more option. The second option allows anybody to post however a warning will tell users how many people can see the message. In this case I get 6 people who can see the message.

Huh, what? 6 people??? I only have 3 people in my team! Earlier I removed 3 of my team members from the team so it looks like this warning might not always give you the right number.

Where have all those General channel setting gone to?

One of the options for example, Allow creating and updating channels has gone away from this screen.

You can find many of the settings that used to be part of the app now in the Teams admin center. See also my post about Microsoft Teams policies.

Other options available in non-General Channels

When you go to the Microsoft Teams Channel settings of a non general channel then you will also find the moderation options. Moderation is not available on the general channel.