Shared channel security and policies

Sharing a channel allows you to communicate with external organizations you work with regularly, without leaving your own workspace. With this feature, we've taken added precautions to protect your privacy and keep your workspace or Enterprise Grid org secure.

Requests to share a channel

Approve a request to share a channel

Once an invitation to share a channel is accepted, it must be approved by someone from the organization that owns the channel with permission to manage shared channels. If the member who accepted the invitation doesn’t have permission to manage shared channels, it must also be approved by someone from their organization who does before the channel is shared.

By default, Workspace Owners and Workspace Admins on the Standard and Plus plans, and Org Owners and Org Admins on the Enterprise Grid plan can manage shared channels. If they’d like, they can also give members this permission.

When approving an accepted invitation, you’ll see the name of the external organization and the person who accepted the invitation. Use this information to confirm that someone from your workspace or Enterprise Grid org would like to share the channel.

Decline a request to share a channel

If you're unsure what a proposed shared channel is for, or who sent the invitation, you have a few options:

• Don’t approve an accepted invitation to share a channel.
• Ask your members for more information if they're already working with the external organization in some capacity.
• Contact the person who sent the invitation for clarification.

Message and file retention

Retention settings chosen for your workspace or Enterprise Grid org will apply to the messages and files sent by members of your organization in shared channels. Anything sent by members of an external organization in shared channels will be retained or deleted based on the retention settings chosen for their workspace or Enterprise Grid org.

Message editing and deletion

Message editing and deletion settings for your workspace or Enterprise Grid org will apply to messages sent in shared channels by members of your organization. For example, an owner or admin can delete messages sent by members of their workspace in a shared channel, but not those sent by a member of an external organization.

Export tools and Data Loss Prevention 

On the Standard and Plus plans, Workspace Owners and Workspace Admins can use Standard Export to export content from public shared channels. On the Plus plan, Workspace Owners can apply to access Corporate Export to export content from all shared channels (public or private) and the related direct messages shared across workspaces. All workspaces can read content or data posted in a shared channel, but only the workspace that sends the data can edit or delete it from Slack.

On the Enterprise Grid plan, Org Owners can use eDiscovery and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions for reviewing and regulating content. In shared channels, only messages and files sent by members of your organization can be regulated and deleted with DLP solutions.

Note: Keep in mind that if an external organization has applied custom retention settings for their workspace or Enterprise Grid org, this will impact the data that can be exported.