#MicrosoftTeams Shared channels challenges

Frane Borozan - October 24, 2022

Now that shared channels have moved into the production for couple of months I have few worries about #MicrosoftTeams Shared Channels (aka B2B direct connect):

Shared channels require both administrators to setup trust – this is pain in the a** and practically slows down process a lot as both sides need to setup the tenant inbound or outbound trust depending on who will collaborate
If you don’t have premium Azure AD license then you can’t fine tune users who can use shared channels, but you need to allow everybody (all users and all #M365 groups). Microsoft come on, is this really necessary for the adoption of the shared channels?
There is no way in knowing who is using shared channels beside digging in the AzureAD signing logs. Am I right for this one? Only in the Azure AD singing logs you can see when somebody used B2B direct connect and basically user from another tenant has logged to your tenant?
#M365 engineers are not educated about it and we need to change this to adopt Shared Channels more. In the last couple of months I heard numerous times from another company when trying to setup B2B direct connect they don’t have it. LOL. They don’t have it because Microsoft requests AzureAD admin/engineers to be involved in the setup process and there is high probability they haven’t heard about it or had a chance to use it so they just say they don’t have that feature
If you don’t use some kind of the governance and strict rules, without the AzureAD premium license you can quickly end up in the mess. By allowing B2B direct connect between two companies (especially if two companies are bigger than couple hundreds people) you will quickly end up in a mess of not knowing how many shared channels you have, who is inside, who is using it and who is not. Microsoft is expanding Microsoft Teams PowerShell module with new cmdlets but this to be a lot better in order to have the chaos under control.

Do you have any recommendations on how to address few of the challenges I had with the #MicrosoftTeams Shared Channels aka B2B direct connect?