Graph API News: APIs for managing shared channels now available in Microsoft Graph

The roll out for the Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels has already started, making thousands of customers very happy. As a software vendor who builds a governance and provisioning solution for Microsoft 365, I am not only interested in the feature roll out but also in the API support for it so I can extend my product accordingly. Today, I want to share with you that the APIs for managing shared channels are available in Microsoft Graph as a beta release. In this blog post, I won’t go through the benefits of shared channels because this has already been presented by other authors (for example, Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels is rolling out to public preview); rather, I will focus on the newly introduced APIs.

Important: Currently, the Microsoft Graph API to create a shared channel is only available to a limited audience. This means that many customers cannot create shared channels programmatically and have to use the Microsoft Teams client for that. For now, only the Microsoft Graph APIs to manage shared channels are available!

Actually, I was a bit surprised by this statement, but I trust that the corresponding team at Microsoft has a good reason for that. In general, I was really looking forward to the API to create shared channels so I can use it in my provisioning and governance solution. I think for now, we just need to wait for the release of this API, which will happen hopefully soon.

Anyway, the APIs for managing shared channels are available, which is already a very good start for governance-related scenarios. I created the following structure that helps me to better understand the use cases where the new shared channel APIs can be used:

Maintain shared channels in user-related scenarios 

• List teams that a user is associated with
• List the users allowed to access a shared channel
• Check whether a user has access to a shared channel

Maintain scenarios when a team hosts one or more shared channel

• List teams shared with a channel
• Get a team shared with a channel
• Unshare a channel with a team

Maintain scenarios when teams have associated shared channels 

• List all channels in a team (either in the team or shared with the team)
• List only channels shared with a team
• Remove a shared channel from a team

I look forward to Microsoft to also release the API to create shared channels for all customers. For now, my team and I will give the new shared channels APIs a try so we can learn and understand them better 😁

Thanks for reading,
Jarbas