Teams Increases Group Chat Limit to 100 Participants and Improves Shareable File Links

Teams Group Chat Limits

Office 365 Message Center Update MC179396 (Roadmap item 51235) brings the news that Teams group chats now support an increased limit of 100 participants (from the previous 50). The roll-out of the new limit starts in June and should be complete by the end of July, except for GCC tenants.

Group chats are a useful way of getting together a set of people to discuss and refine an issue before bringing it for wider debate (or announce a decision) in a channel or via email. Unlike a team channel, where any member can see anything, a chat is limited to those invited to join. Chats don’t have owners, and anyone in a chat has the same rights as others, including the ability to remove someone else from the conversation. Files shared in a group chat are stored in the OneDrive for Business account of the sharer instead of a SharePoint site.

It’s good practice to give a name to a group chat. This allows participants to identify the chat in their chat list and it’s also helpful if you ever need to look for something with eDiscovery as the chat name appears in the compliance items captured in Exchange mailboxes of the chat participants.

Teams Shareable File Links with Permissions

Teams has always had the ability to generate links to files stored in its SharePoint sites. Message Center update MC179400 (Roadmap item 51230) tells us that the shareable links created by Teams for posting into channel conversations and chats will now hold permissions in much the same way as the links generated by SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. As shown in Figure 2, you can assign permissions (including the ability to edit) to:

• Anyone with the link (if allowed by the tenant sharing settings for SharePoint Online).
• Tenant users with the link.
• People with existing access (members of the team).
• Specific people.

Once Teams generates a link, you can copy it into a channel conversation or chat. This action converts the link (something like https://tenant.sharepoint.com/:w:/s/O365ExchPro/ER3RMYkKBUBGiPXVqXQFgdkBK-rOsJHA6FSmqrr_75iaeQ?e=jGsU8C ) into a “file chiclet object” (a new term to me).

The new form of shareable links are rolling out to Office 365 tenants in May 2019 and should be available worldwide by the end of June.

---

These small but important changes are the kind of stuff we track on a daily basis to make sure that the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is as up-to-date as we can make it. Read Chapter 13 for the latest information about Teams.