Channel Cross Posting “dive-in how to guide”

Channel Cross Posting was released to Teams this week. It is one feature in a long list of anticipated updates to Teams. While the description and it’s use is simple “Post once, publish the same post to several target channels ” here is post describing it step by step – along with some use cases when it would be useful. Use cases are at the end of this article.

How to Cross Post to different Channels

First step is to start writing a new message and open the format/advanced editor. From there you can find a funtion to activate cross posting.

When you click on the Post in multiple channels -function you get to choose which channels are targets. Note: you can choose channels from different teams as well. On default your current channel is selected.

Note: files cannot be included in cross posted message

When choosing channels you select them from the list of teams and channels you are a member or owner of. Your shown teams have their shown channels expanded for easy selected (one more reason to keep a tidy shown teams and channels list!) – all hidden teams are closed on default so you need to click them before selecting a channel.

There is also a search functionality on top. Which is very useful.

After clicking Update you can see channels in the post .

Cross posting also works with announcements.

Once the post is ready and you hit send it will make appearance in target channels. You can identify if a message is cross posted by looking at a small indicator on top.

Each target channel gets their own copy of the post. Users can like it independently, reply to it, copy link to it etc. However, there is no edit message option available.

There is no editing after cross post!

Cross posting has one significant different, at least during this time when this post was written, that cross posted messages cannot be edited. This applies to the original post and also to targets.

Based on roadmap information, one day we should be able to edit posts as well.

Deleting a cross post

When you delete a cross post, you get option to delete the post from all target channels. You can start the deletion process from any parts of the cross post.

Use case examples

• News / announcements that are relevant to several teams. These could be organizational teams, offices, virtual teams etc.
• A specific use case of news, product updates, urgent notes is the use in Firstline worker scenarios / stores / shifts -> information that is relevant to some teams is easily shared to multiple teams and each have their own conversation. However, you can’t include files in these posts – you have to do this manually or use links.
• Making sure the message reaches people better: sharing the post to multiple operational teams / channels pops it out to user’s own hub for work.
• A big team with lots of channels: people will have only some channels shown: post it to multiple important channels in the team to maximize visibility. Why not general? Perhaps the message is not relevant to all channels, or general is having too much active conversation.
• Sharing information to specific channels in one or more teams. While general channel could reach everyone out in those teams the message content may not be relevant to all – only to some portion of the team: perhaps sharing the issue report to Bugs and Developers – channel. This is a kind of variation from the previous one.

Can you make up more? Please write them in comments!

Just like with many other Teams features: this can be misused by doing unnecessary cross posting. Use only when it is needed – don’t make this a habit.