channel-audit

Channel Audit

Audit all Microsoft Teams channels across your teams to assess activity levels and engagement health. Identifies inactive channels, stale conversations, and low‑engagement spaces — then presents a prioritized audit report with recommended cleanup actions such as archiving, merging, or reviving channels.

When to Use

• "Audit my Teams channels"
• "Which channels are inactive?"
• "Find dead channels across my teams"
• "Teams channel cleanup report"
• "Show me channels with no posts in the last month"
• "Which channels should we archive?"
• "Channel health check for the Engineering team"

Instructions

Step 1: Identify the User

workiq-ask_work_iq (
  question: "What is my profile information including display name, email, and time zone?"
)

Extract displayName, email, and timeZone for date calculations.

Step 2: Discover All Teams and Channels

List every team and their channels:

workiq-ask_work_iq (
  question: "List all Microsoft Teams teams I belong to. For each team, list all channels including the channel name, description, type (standard, private, shared), and creation date."
)

Build an inventory of every channel:

• Team name
• Channel name, description
• Channel type (standard, private, shared)
• Created date (from channel metadata)

If the response is too large or truncated, query teams individually:

workiq-ask_work_iq (
  question: "List all channels in the '<team name>' team including channel name, description, type, and creation date."
)

Step 3: Assess Channel Activity

For each channel (or batch of channels within a team), pull recent messages to measure activity:

workiq-ask_work_iq (
  question: "Show me the 10 most recent messages in the '<channel name>' channel of the '<team name>' team. For each message include the sender, date, content summary, reply count, and whether it was from a bot or connector."
)

For each channel, calculate:

• Last message date — when the most recent message was posted
• Days since last post — time delta from today
• Message count (in the sample) — indicator of volume
• Unique authors — how many distinct people posted
• Reply depth — are messages getting replies or going unanswered?
• Content type — are posts substantive or just bot notifications?

Step 4: Get Channel Membership Data

For each channel (especially those flagged as low‑activity):

workiq-ask_work_iq (
  question: "How many members are in the '<channel name>' channel of the '<team name>' team? List the member count."
)

Record:

• Member count — total members in the channel
• Activity ratio — unique posters vs. total members (engagement metric)

Step 5: Classify Channel Health

Categorize each channel based on activity metrics:

🟢 Active — Messages within the last 7 days, multiple authors, replies present

• Engagement: healthy, no action needed

🟡 Slow — Last message 7–30 days ago, limited authors

• Recommendation: monitor, consider consolidating

🟠 Stale — Last message 30–90 days ago, very few participants

• Recommendation: notify channel owners, consider archiving

🔴 Dead — No messages in 90+ days

• Recommendation: archive or delete

⚪ Bot‑Only — Recent messages, but only from automated bots or connectors

• Recommendation: review if the channel serves a purpose beyond bot notifications

Step 6: Identify Potential Duplicates

Compare channel names and descriptions across teams to find potential duplicates:

• Channels with similar names (e.g., "#design" and "#design-team")
• Channels with overlapping membership and similar topics
• Flag these as merge candidates

Step 7: Compile the Audit Report

Output Format

🔍 CHANNEL AUDIT REPORT
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📅 Audit date: {date}
👤 Audited by: {displayName}
🏢 Teams scanned: {N}  ·  📢 Channels audited: {N}

📊 HEALTH OVERVIEW
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🟢 Active:    {N} channels  ({percentage}%)
🟡 Slow:      {N} channels  ({percentage}%)
🟠 Stale:     {N} channels  ({percentage}%)
🔴 Dead:      {N} channels  ({percentage}%)
⚪ Bot‑only:  {N} channels  ({percentage}%)

🔴 DEAD CHANNELS — Recommend Archive ({count})
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  {Team} › #{Channel}
     📅 Last post: {date} ({N} days ago)
     👥 Members: {N}  ·  💬 Last author: {name}
     💡 Action: Archive
  
  {Team} › #{Channel}
     📅 Last post: {date} ({N} days ago)
     👥 Members: {N}  ·  💬 Last author: {name}
     💡 Action: Archive

🟠 STALE CHANNELS — Monitor / Consider Archiving ({count})
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  {Team} › #{Channel}
     📅 Last post: {date} ({N} days ago)
     👥 Members: {N}  ·  📝 Active posters: {N} ({ratio}%)
     💡 Action: Notify owner, review purpose

🟡 SLOW CHANNELS — Watch List ({count})
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  {Team} › #{Channel}
     📅 Last post: {date} ({N} days ago)
     👥 Members: {N}  ·  📝 Active posters: {N}

⚪ BOT‑ONLY CHANNELS ({count})
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  {Team} › #{Channel}
     🤖 Only automated posts detected
     💡 Action: Review if bot output is still needed

🔄 POTENTIAL DUPLICATES
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  • {Team1} › #{Channel A}  ↔  {Team2} › #{Channel B}
    Reason: Similar names, overlapping members
    💡 Action: Consider merging

🟢 HEALTHY CHANNELS ({count})
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  {Team} › #{Channel} — {N} posts last 7d, {N} authors
  {Team} › #{Channel} — {N} posts last 7d, {N} authors

📋 RECOMMENDED ACTIONS
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  1. 🗑️ Archive {N} dead channels
  2. 📧 Notify owners of {N} stale channels
  3. 🔄 Review {N} potential duplicate pairs
  4. 🤖 Review {N} bot‑only channels

Parameters

Parameter	Required	Default	Description
Teams	No	All user's teams	Specific teams to audit
Inactive Threshold	No	30 days	Days without posts to flag as stale
Dead Threshold	No	90 days	Days without posts to flag as dead
Include Healthy	No	true	Show healthy channels in the report
Include General	No	false	Include default "General" channels
Sort By	No	Last activity	Sort order: "last-activity", "member-count", "team"

Required MCP Tools

MCP Server	Tool	Purpose
workiq (Local WorkIQ CLI)	ask_work_iq	User identity, team/channel discovery, message activity retrieval, and membership data

Tips

• Run monthly to keep your Teams workspace clean and navigable.
• Say "audit Engineering team only" to scope to a single team for faster results.
• Use "show only dead channels" to skip healthy channels and focus on cleanup.
• After identifying channels to archive, coordinate with team owners before taking action.
• After identifying channels to clean up, coordinate with team owners to take action.
• General channels cannot be archived or deleted — they are skipped by default.

Examples

Full workspace audit

"Audit all my Teams channels and tell me which ones I should clean up."

Scans every team the user belongs to, classifies all channels by health status, detects bot-only and duplicate channels, and produces a complete prioritized report with archive and merge recommendations.

---

Single-team audit with narrow threshold

"Do a channel health check for the Engineering team — flag anything with no posts in the last 2 weeks."

Scopes the audit to the Engineering team only and applies a custom inactive threshold of 14 days instead of the default 30, surfacing slow channels that would otherwise be missed.

---

Dead channels only, ready for archiving

"Show me only the dead channels across all teams — nothing healthy, just what we should archive."

Runs a full scan but filters the output to dead channels (90+ days without posts), listing each with member count, last author, and a direct archive recommendation — ideal for a quick cleanup session.

Error Handling

Cannot retrieve user details

• Cause: ask_work_iq returns an authentication or permission error.
• Action: Re-authenticate and retry. Ensure the WorkIQ CLI has proper Microsoft 365 permissions.

Team list is empty or incomplete

• Cause: ask_work_iq returns no teams or only a subset of expected teams.
• Action: Confirm the user is an active member of the expected teams in the Teams admin center. Guest accounts may have restricted visibility.

Channel message retrieval fails for one or more channels

• Cause: ask_work_iq returns an error or no data for private or shared channels where the user lacks membership.
• Action: The audit skips inaccessible channels and notes them in the report as ⚠️ Access Restricted. Request channel membership or ask a channel owner to run the audit.

No messages returned but channel exists

• Cause: The channel was created but never had any posts, or messages were deleted.
• Action: The channel is treated as Dead (0 days activity) and flagged for archiving. Verify manually before archiving if the channel was recently created.

Member list unavailable

• Cause: ask_work_iq cannot retrieve membership data for a private channel due to permission restrictions.
• Action: Member count and activity ratio are omitted for that channel; all other metrics are still reported. The channel is still classified by message activity alone.

Large workspace timeouts

• Cause: Auditing teams with dozens of channels may require many ask_work_iq calls and take significant time.
• Action: Scope the audit to a single team (e.g., "audit the Marketing team only") to reduce call volume, or run the audit during off-peak hours.