Archiving a Teams Channel

It's like hiding a channel, for everyone

Before we get started, I wanted to note that Microsoft has removed the ability for many people to open a Developer account and get a free M365 tenant for testing. This saddens me because the Developer program was an excellent way for many of us to learn and get our hands dirty with running a tenant. I’ve benefitted from it for the last couple of years. It also makes me a bit nervous in the future because that Dev tenant is how I do the testing for this newsletter. It seems that, for now, I can keep it, but Microsoft will be checking in on existing tenants more often. Should they decide that I’m not using it with Visual Studio and, thus, can’t continue with the program, I’ll have to purchase a single-user tenant to continue testing, which is not an insignificant expense for one person.

Hopefully, it won’t come to that. But, if you value the content you get as a paid subscriber here, consider suggesting it to a friend.

Photo by Nana Smirnova on Unsplash

When I heard about this new feature from the M365 roadmap, my eDiscovery brain immediately asked a question. “Do the messages get archived to a different location?”

I couldn’t get an answer to that question until the feature rolled out to my tenant, so I waited patiently.

And waited some more….

Alas, it is here now, and I was able to do some testing.

What I found wasn’t very interesting, which, for eDiscovery folks, is a good thing!

It’s probably easiest to think of archiving a channel in terms of hiding a channel or a Team, except that the Team owner can hide the channel for everyone.

Let’s dig into the details: