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New Option to Remove User from Teams Chat When Required
A group chat is a conversation in Teams between three and 250 people. The participants can be a mixture of tenant member and guest users. Group chats can be very ad-hoc affairs or they can last for an extended period. They can be given names (a good idea to help track what’s being discussed in chats) or not.
Up to now, it has not been possible to remove someone from a group chat, meaning that if you make a mistake and add someone who shouldn’t be in a chat, the only way you could correct the mistake is to create another group chat, add all the other participants, and leave the person you want to exclude out. Obviously, this is not very efficient.
Removing Someone From a Teams Group Chat
The ability to remove users from group chats is controlled by the Teams messaging policy assigned to users. Obviously, people in a chat might be assigned different policies, so it’s possible that some participants in a chat can remove users while others cannot. Assuming that the assigned messaging policy allows, to remove a chat participant, open the chat participant list and click the X beside the name of the person you want to remove. Figure 1 shows the user interface for the Teams desktop and browser clients while Figure 2 shows how to do the same thing with the Teams iOS client.
After a participant has been removed, they still have access to all the messages sent up to the point when they were removed. However, they can no longer send messages (Figure 3).
Guest accounts who are participants in group chats can’t remove other participants. However, both tenant and guest accounts can choose to leave a chat at any time. It’s good housekeeping practice to leave chats that no longer discuss anything of interest to you. The only chat you can’t leave is the chat with self.
Correcting Mistakes
If you make a mistake and remove someone whom you shouldn’t have, you can correct the error by adding them back to the group chat (Figure 4), making sure to include all chat history so the newly-rejoined participant doesn’t lose out on any information that’s been shared in the chat.
You can play games with removing and adding a person. For example, you could remove someone, make some horrible remarks about them, and then rejoin them to the chat but make sure not to include any chat history. The rejoined individual can see all the messages sent in the chat before they were removed and those sent after they rejoined, but not the offensive ones in the middle. They might guess that something happened by looking at the notes of additions and removals Teams records when people join and leave a group chat, but they might not.
Group Chats Not Owned by Anyone
The critical thing to remember is that the Teams architecture regards group chats as being equally owned by the participants. Any participant can remove another participants from a group chat and anyone can add someone to a group chat. It’s all very democratic.
Need to know more about how to use Teams? Read Chapter 13 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. The chapter in the latest update is 90 pages long (in the PDF edition). We must have some useful information there!