Microsoft recently released a new Teams feature called Shared Channels. Shared Channels give organizations the ability to collaborate with external participants directly within the team without the need for tenant switching. In the past, if an organization invited you to a team channel, you would need to use “tenant switching” to navigate from one tenant to another while collaborating within channels outside your organization. With Shared Channels, your external participants can collaborate with you directly within their teams’ client via your shared channel making everything much more seamless than before.
SharePoint Online has always been a viable way to share data across-org but with Shared Channels we can now reach a level of collaboration with our clients that was difficult before. This new capability provides a gateway for both parties to share files, hold conversations, meet, and review documents in a secure and deliberate way, without switching tenants.
Shared Channels relies on Azure B2B Direct Connect which allows your organization to limit and control who your end-users can include within a shared channel. This ensures that external access is limited by who is approved to use your services.
Give your clients the power of Infodash
When an external user accesses your shared channel, they have access to your custom line-of-business apps that you have deployed to Teams. Infodash has over 40 web parts, including connectivity to your back-end data. Any client that has access to a team using Infodash will have access to the data and tools Infodash provides.
Imagine a scenario where your client logs into their shared channel and they are greeted with a personalized dashboard based on their persona within Infodash. They see their largest matters, primary firm contacts, invoices, outstanding tasks, their overall matter-spend and have direct access to their documents, all within a single pane of glass.
Maybe they need to get in touch with someone from the firm? They use the Infodash People Directory to find the person they are looking for (limited to only people involved with this client) and see that they are currently available and online. They engage with that user via chat within Teams and get their question answered. This is all done while both parties are looking at the same information, presented in Infodash, powered by Microsoft Teams and shared channels.
Governance
Azure and Microsoft 365 provide a host of tools to govern and manage access to your data. However, these tools rely heavily on the IT team. Infodash can help bring these events to the key stakeholders for decision making and access review. What if three of my external participants haven’t used the team site in 30 days? Infodash can help facilitate the disabling of their accounts to ensure unnecessary access is prevented. What if my channel hasn’t been used in 90 days? Maybe it’s time to archive that channel?
Firms should be working on zero-trust and with the power of Infodash, Teams, and SharePoint Online we can help you deliver a secure environment and experience that your clients will love! Request a demo now.