Slack Launches Private Shared Channels

When Slack launched Shared Channels last September, the company said it will be introducing private shared channels. Today, the company is bringing private shared channels as a beta for teams using its paid subscription plans.

First, some context: Shared Channels on Slack lets one team invite another team or company to work together, to collaborate on projects, etc. The feature lets you create a channel with members from both the teams, accessible from both the teams’ respective workspaces.

Private shared channels are basically an expansion of shared channels, except they are…private. This means you can choose to hide the shared channel from certain users in your team, and only let a select number of members access the shared channel. These shared channels can be set as private in one workspace for one team, and as public for the other, or as private for both which is pretty clever.

Shared channels are basically a supercharged implementation of guest access that’s super useful when your company or team needs to work with a partner company or an outsourced team. Shared channels are notably a unique feature of Slack, and it’s one of the features new communication tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts Chat, or Atlassian Stride are still lacking, most of which–especially Microsoft Teams–only have a simple guest access feature.