How do I set up a Microsoft Teams Shared Channel?

Required Permissions

Verify the following permissions before attempting to create a shared channel.

1. You must be assigned to a Teams Policy with the "Create shared channels" and "Invite external users to shared channels" permissions enabled. You can manage your Teams policies from the Teams Admin Center

2. You must be an Owner of the Team (in your tenant) from which you'll create the shared channel.

3. The users you'll invite from the external organization must (in their Teams configuration) be assigned to a Teams Policy with the "Join external shared channels" permission enabled.

4. In the Teams Admin Center, verify the external organization is not blocked. If you use a whitelist, this means they should be on the whitelist. If you use a blacklist, they should not be on the blacklist:

5. You'll need to set up Microsoft Entra ID B2B direct connect. The process is detailed in this Microsoft documentation. It's rather involved and requires actions to be taken for both your tenant and the tenant of the external organization you'll be sharing a channel with. For both sides, this process is handled through the Microsoft Entra ID Admin Center.

Required Permissions

Verify the following permissions before attempting to create a shared channel.

Video Guide for B2B Direct Connect Setup

Debugging B2B Direct Connect issues

If you believe you and your customer have set up B2B direct connect properly, but you're still unable to invite them to your shared Teams channel, you can use the diagnostic tool offered by Microsoft. Note that you'll need to be an admin for your Teams tenant to use this tool. And you'll need to know the email & tenant domain for the user you're trying to invite.

We've also created this doc intended to be shared with your customers to help them set up the necessary permissions in their tenant:

📄 What steps should my customer take to enable Teams Shared Channels to work with Pylon?

Shared channel setup steps

1. Go to the "More options" dropdown next to the Team name, and select "Add channel":

2. In the modal that appears, fill out the channel name, and be sure to choose "Shared" as the channel type. If "Shared" does not appear as an option, please verify you have the required permissions from steps 1 and 2 of Required Permissions above.

3. In the next modal, you'll be prompted to invite external users. You should invite them using their email they use to log in to Teams. If you see the message "You can't share this channel with people from this org", please verify that you've completed steps 3-5 from Required Permissions. Note also if you just set these Entra ID permissions up, they may take some time to propagate. You can feel free to skip this modal and try again later if the permissions aren't working yet.

4. At any time, you can add more users from the external (customer) organization using the "Add members" button in the channel sidebar:

Configure the integration user for shared channel messaging

Microsoft Teams shared channels do not support bot messaging, which means the Pylon bot cannot send messages directly into shared channels. To work around this, you need to configure an integration user — a dedicated Microsoft 365 account that Pylon will use to send messages on behalf of your team.

Step 1: Create an integration user

Create a dedicated user account in your Microsoft 365 Admin Center (e.g., pylon-integration@yourcompany.com). This account will be used solely by Pylon to send messages in shared channels and must have a paid Microsoft Teams Essentials license in order to send messages.

Step 2: Add the integration user to your shared channels

Add the integration user as a member to every shared channel where Pylon needs to send messages. The integration user must be a member of each channel individually — it will not work unless it has been explicitly added, either through a team or directly.

Step 3: Configure the integration user in Pylon

In Pylon, navigate to Apps Directory → Microsoft Teams. Under the Shared channel messaging section:

1. Grant admin consent — An Azure AD admin must sign in and check the "Consent on behalf of your organization" checkbox. This only needs to be done once.

2. Authenticate the integration user — Sign in as the integration user account you created in Step 1 to grant Pylon permission to send messages on its behalf.