Automatic Hiding of Teams Channels Continues

No Detail Available About How Hide Inactive Channels Feature Works

In July 2024, I discussed the initial deployment of the Teams feature to automatically hide inactive channels. Time moves on and the inactive channels are being hidden worldwide because the feature is now generally available in commercial Microsoft 365 tenants. GCC tenants should have it soon and GCC High and DOD tenants by the end of October 2024.

Two common comments about the feature have surfaced in the Microsoft Technical Community. The first is that the measurement of how Microsoft defines an inactive channel is opaque. In their original announcement, Microsoft says that the decision to hide a channel is because a user hasn’t “interacted with [the channel] over the past 45 days.” No further explanation is available what constitutes an interaction. Based on unscientific testing, it seems that opening the channel to read messages is sufficient rather than the more emphatic interaction of posting new topics, replying to messages, or responding with a reaction.

Hide Inactive Channels and the Lack of a Tenant-Level Control

The second issue is the lack of tenant control over the feature. Teams hides channels whether tenant administrators) like it or not. A user-level setting exists in the general section Teams settings app (Figure 1), but there’s nothing available in a Teams policy or a tenant-level property to disable hiding inactive channels. I don’t see anything in a Graph API that might disable hiding inactive channels either.

Users have the option to run the hide channel process interactively (the Hide now button).

Hide Inactive Channels and Notification Suppression

Hiding inactive channels has a side effect that users might not expect. Message center notification MC793969 (last updated 31 May 2024) covers the suppression of some notifications from hidden channels. When Teams hides a channel, it also suppresses notifications in the user activity feed for team and channel mentions, reactions, replies, and apps. The only notifications that now appear are where the user is tagged or personally mentioned.

This is a similar change to the one in MC793965 (17 May 2024) where Teams suppresses notifications for muted chats while allowing notifications for personal mentions.

The changes in MC793969 and MC793965 are both generally available. I think a fair case can be made that suppressing notifications from muted chats is perfectly acceptable because the user makes an explicit choice to mute a chat, presumably with good reason. It would be strange to want to see notifications for activities in a chat after muting it.

But muting notifications for hidden channels is a different case when some channels are hidden by users and some through an automatic process that people don’t understand well. Missing some newly-hidden channels in the channel list is easy and won’t do too much damage as it’s easy to find and unhide a channel if necessary. But it might be different if someone depends on notifications to keep track of what’s happening in a channel.

Some Tuning Required

Hiding inactive channels and suppressing notifications are part of a general Microsoft effort to make Teams a more manageable application from a user perspective. Being faced with a channel list that extends over hundreds of items can be very off-putting, as can seeing a flood of notifications in an activity feed. Removing unwanted clamor from the activity feed is a good idea. It might be even better if users had some control over whether they wanted to continue to receive notifications from channels that Teams automatically hides.

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