A group chat is a conversation in Teams between three and fifty people, which can be a mixture of tenant 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 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 remove users from group chats feature 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. To remove someone, 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 desktop and browser client while Figure 2 shows how to do the same thing with the iOS client.
Figure 1: Selecting someone to remove from a Teams group chat Figure 2: How to remove someone from a Teams group chat using the iOS client
After someone is 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).
Figure 3: Old messages are visible, but the removed participant can’t send any more messages
Guest accounts who are participants in group chats can’t remove other participants.
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 person doesn’t lose out on any information that’s been shared in the chat.
Figure 4: Adding someone to a Teams group chat (and specifying what chats they can see)
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
Remember that Teams regards group chats as being equally owned by the participants. Anyone can remove someone 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!
The user being removed doesn’t know who removed them, but the others remaining in the chat do because Teams notes something like “Tony Redmond removed Sanjay Patel from the chat.”
If you’re logged into your home tenant as a tenant user, you can remove people from group chats. As shown in the article, expose the list of people in the chat and click the X beside the name of the person you want to remove.
is there a way to leave the group chat and remove the history. I ask because I have a situation where associates can add files in the group chat but some of them do not see the files on the files tab in teams. I have removed and readded with all conversation history but still no files are present on the files section. This is only happening for a couple people in the group chat.
Files in group chats are in the OneDrive account of the person who shares the files. The permissions on the files must allow access to all chat participants. Teams adds the permission when a file is posted, but if someone joins the chat afterwards you have to adjust the permissions.
How can I bulk remove a lot of people from a chat? None of them were invited so they don’t show up in the calendar event, they just had the chat link – I can’t go through individually removing 75 people. Any help appreciated, thanks!
Unfortunately I don’t have a good answer but to remove them individually. There’s no PowerShell cmdlet to do it and I suspect that writing Graph code to do the trick might take much longer than processing the removals manually.
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Can they see who removed them?
The user being removed doesn’t know who removed them, but the others remaining in the chat do because Teams notes something like “Tony Redmond removed Sanjay Patel from the chat.”
Where can we see that?
If you’re logged into your home tenant as a tenant user, you can remove people from group chats. As shown in the article, expose the list of people in the chat and click the X beside the name of the person you want to remove.
i cant see the x
Anyway to block the remove option?
Not that I know of.
Is there any way to remove the “Tony Redmond removed Sanjay Patel from the chat.” bit so people cannot see if you have added or removed anyone?
I don’t think so.
is there a way to leave the group chat and remove the history. I ask because I have a situation where associates can add files in the group chat but some of them do not see the files on the files tab in teams. I have removed and readded with all conversation history but still no files are present on the files section. This is only happening for a couple people in the group chat.
Files in group chats are in the OneDrive account of the person who shares the files. The permissions on the files must allow access to all chat participants. Teams adds the permission when a file is posted, but if someone joins the chat afterwards you have to adjust the permissions.
The issue is that the person sharing the file in the group chat cannot see their own file in the files tab but can in the conversation history
That’s just odd. Time to have a chat with Microsoft support…
any option to remove a person both on call and chat information? currently if we remove someone they still receive latest chat logs
Any participant in a chat can remote another participant. Is that what you want?
How can I bulk remove a lot of people from a chat? None of them were invited so they don’t show up in the calendar event, they just had the chat link – I can’t go through individually removing 75 people. Any help appreciated, thanks!
Unfortunately I don’t have a good answer but to remove them individually. There’s no PowerShell cmdlet to do it and I suspect that writing Graph code to do the trick might take much longer than processing the removals manually.
I have almost 300 attendees to do this with so am hoping that someone knows a way to remove in bulk…
If you remove someone from a chat group, do they get a notification to let them know?
Try it. I don’t believe they do.
I am getting an error as “Unable to remove participant” You do not have permission to remove this participant from the chat.
Why is that ?
No idea. Maybe it’s a transient error. If it isn’t, ask Microsoft support. They can see your tenant data. I can’t.