As your friend, I have to let you know that you might be oversharing… but only with regard to your Teams and SharePoint sites! As a Team owner, it never hurts to review your Team permissions now and then, and this would be a great one to double check. The good news is, if you are oversharing, this is very fixable.

Private and Public Teams

When you set up a new Team group, one of the first decisions you face is this one: Private or Public?

As the prompt suggests:

• A Private team requires that the Team owner grant permission for someone to join as a member.
• A Public Team can be joined by anybody without approval of, or even notification to, the Team owner.

If you have marked your team as Public, any user within our organization, meaning WSU faculty, staff, and students, can click Join a Team, browse or search the list, and join your team group without you receiving any sort of prompt or notification.

SharePoint Access and Public Teams

The inherent intentions of Teams as a collaborative tool presents a particularly concerning behavior with Public Teams. As we discuss in Teams training, every Team group is powered by a SharePoint site. In the case of a Public Team, this SharePoint site is also public, but is also a Team type of SharePoint site, designed for collaboration.

This means that, in your Public Team, any user within WSU can use the M365 search to find files contained in your Team, visit the associated site, edit the files, and even delete or move files.

Below is a SharePoint site that is tied to a Public Team. I am not a member of this Team, and yet I can delete this file I have selected in the image, edit it, move it, rename it, and so on.

This is the default behavior of a Public Team: anybody is supposed to be able to join in on the collaboration. This may not have been what you thought you were signing up for when you made a public Team.

If this is not your intentions, and you still have your heart set on a Public Team, there are ways to adjust permissions on files and folders. We discuss this type of permission adjustment in Teams Advanced training and SharePoint training (visit myTraining for times and registration).

More often than not, however, when I discuss this default behavior with people, they choose to make their Team Private.

View or Edit Team Privacy

If, at this point, you are a concerned Team owner, here is how you can check or alter your Team privacy.

1. In your Team group, go to the More menu (…) next to the Team name and select Manage Team.

2. Go to the Settings tab and Edit.

3. Here you can view or alter your Team’s privacy settings.

Another Option: Join with a Code

Looking for a compromise? Here is another option that might interest you: Join with a Code.

If you want to allow only specific users to join your Team and collaborate, you can mark your Team as Private, and enable Join with a Code.

Go back to your Manage Team screen.

Visit your Settings tab, and under Team Code click Generate.

From your prospective member’s perspective, they will go to Join Team, and enter the code you give them where prompted (below).

At any point, you can return to the Team Settings to Remove the code you created. This will prevent new members from accessing Team.

Other Concerns?

Were you oversharing? Do you have concerns about previously public files? You can visit your File Details in SharePoint to see if any edits have been made to files, and by whom.

And, as always, feel free to reach out and we can help you take a look at your site. The Technology Help Desk can be reached at: (316) 978 4357, option 1; or helpdesk@wichita.edu.

Training Opportunities

Don’t forget to visit myTraining for live training sessions on Teams and SharePoint. Sessions are available to faculty and staff at WSU. I hope to see you there!