So Cross-Channel Posting in Teams has arrived, and I have to say I’m struggling to see it’s benefit. One thing I’ve always liked about Teams is the ability to easily communicate with a group of people without having to spam their inbox and the inevitable forks of that conversation that would occur, with replies and forwards all over the place.
Enter Cross-Channel posting, which I was initially rather excited about. Without giving it an unnecessary amount of thought, it seemed like something that could be useful, but in practice I think it has limited uses.
To create a Cross-Channel post, there is a new ‘Post in multiple channels’ button available to you when drafting a post as shown below.
When you click this something frightening happens… A ‘To’ bar appears which makes this hauntingly reminiscent of drafting an email but lets go with it. In this bar, there is a button to allow you to select which Channels you want to post to.
Microsoft have limited the number of Channels you can select to 50. While I think this is certainly a sensible decision, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to post to more than 50 channels, at that point I would questioning if Teams is really the right medium to share what I am posting. In my example, I am going to select a more sensible and believable 4 Channels across 3 different Teams:
When you submit your post it will automatically be posted to all the channels you selected. Cross-Channel posts can be identified by a small icon next to the post time:
That icon, however, doesn’t tell you anything else. It doesn’t tell you which channels the post has been posted to. It is an indication to the user that is utterly meaningless. And it doesn’t stop there…. Editing is gone too!
As per this Microsoft Support article, “Once you post to multiple channels, you cannot edit the post. To make any changes, you’ll need to delete the post”.
So, if you are posting to multiple channels, for the love of god don’t make a mistake! I suppose this wouldn’t matter if you only posted to a few channels, but if this was the case I would probably just copy and paste my post. At least this way if I want to edit the post I can do, without having to delete it – losing all the reactions and replies.
Conclusion
I am all for Microsoft continually developing cool new features for Teams, I am always excited to play around with them and see how we can use this to improve productivity. This one to me though does seem a bit pointless. Considering the number of key features that are still missing from Teams, it surprises me they are investing time in niche features such as this.
What I think would be a cool, and slightly more useful, implementation of this feature would be a Reddit-esque ability to cross-post someone else’s posts from another Public team. This way if I see something cool, I can share with my team quickly and easily without having to copy and paste the post contents. This has the added benefit of promoting public Teams.
I hope I am being premature in judging this feature and this is just the first iteration of many releases of this feature. I hope.
