Any MS Teams admin experts here? Deleting chats ...

[StephenP]

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone knows how you can permanently delete a complete chat in MS Teams? Is it an admin-only function?

Can't find an option in the Windows app and even if you delete items individually, they can still be undone? Doesn't seem sensible from a privacy/confidentiality perspective.

Edited by StephenP on Wednesday 6th May 16:31

[clived]

StephenP said:

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone knows how you can permanently delete a complete chat in MS Teams? Is it an admin-only function?

Can't find an option in the Windows app and even if you delete items individually, they can still be undone? Doesn't seem sensible from a privacy/confidentiality perspective.

Best regards
Steve

Seems sensible from a HR perspective: Someone says something that breaches an HR policy in a chat and then deletes it - evidence gone.
Seems sensible from a conversation integrity perspective: Discussion between parties, one party accidentally or maliciously deletes thread and valuable conversation lost or result they didn't like erased...

I have no expectation of privacy or confidentiality when using a corporate resource, but in Teams limit team members to those who should be party to the conversation. If you need further layers of privacy, set up a private channel within the Team.

More importantly, what did you say? ;-)

[random_username]

StephenP said:

Just wondering if anyone knows how you can permanently delete a complete chat in MS Teams? Is it an admin-only function?

Unless it's changed recently, it's not possible to delete a complete chat, even as an admin. You can hide it, you can mute it, and delete individual messages within a chat (from your end only?) but you cannot actually delete the entire message. It appears to have been a feature request on MS radar for a very long time.

But yes, what did you say that you are now regretting?

[hyphen]

clived said:

Seems sensible from a HR perspective: Someone says something that breaches an HR policy in a chat and then deletes it - evidence gone.

And a goverment regulator perspective, all busines electronic Comms so have to be stored 7 years don't they.

[mmm-five]

Our company is currently trying to work out how they keep the Teams chat history in users Outlook folders, like they currently do for SfB.

It looks like Teams keeps the history, but it's not easily accessible by either the user or the HR/IT teams.

As a regulated (i.e. auditable) industry we have to have different lengths of storage retention for different comms - and this is not making the switch to Teams an easy one.

[StephenP]

Not me or anything that's been said, just that whilst doing some looking around I noticed there is no option to do so either by the user (other than deleting items individually) or at an admin level and it just made be curious.

I wonder how a company goes about deleting any references to personal data in conversations - for example, credit card details. Having a policy in place to retain data is one thing. Making it impossible to delete, even when there might be a reasonable or legal reason, Seems an odd limitation but I guess that's why people are requesting it!

[duff-man]

I'm sure there's settings within the compliance & security admin center to set retention polices on channel messages, however not for private messages.

There's also settings for data classification and the ability to retain certain criteria for varying lengths of time and the ability to run searches for regulation/litigation using eDiscovery.

[dave_s13]

I've got a teams question

You join a meeting, do your bits, leave then call someone else on teams but the chat from the original call keeps pinging through while your on a new call....each message with its own ding ding notification....very annoying.

Why when you leave the meeting doesn't it stop the bloody chat messages pinging through, and how do you stop it?

[The_Nugget]

You can mute a conversation.

[Bullett]

mmm-five said:

Our company is currently trying to work out how they keep the Teams chat history in users Outlook folders, like they currently do for SfB.

It looks like Teams keeps the history, but it's not easily accessible by either the user or the HR/IT teams.

As a regulated (i.e. auditable) industry we have to have different lengths of storage retention for different comms - and this is not making the switch to Teams an easy one.

I can't help with putting them in Outlook but MS are due to release thier interaction recording API this month to GA status, that's audio, text/chat and video. Audio/video is captured in real-time (I think, not seen the architecture yet) chats/text will be an ingestion API. It's so 3rd parties can ingest, store, analyse and audit the content.
If you have the appropriate dev skils you might be able to use that to copy them over to Outlook or use one of the third party offerings.