Create ad hoc group chats from distribution list
It would be great if we could start an Ad-Hoc group chat by entering an AD distribution list or email enabled security group in the add a user field. in case you want to send a message to a department or group but it doesn't make sense for you to join their group.

18 comments
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Jordon commented
This already exists, just not as an ad-hoc group chat. Ad-hoc group chats are limited on the qty of participants.
A Team has a group chat in it already, and a Team can have a dynamic membership based on groups and other azure ad settings. Perhaps look into that. -
John commented
Teams should have the feature to send chat to a distribution group in active directory. We have over 1000 users in our company and this would be very helpful for our existing departments.
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Ted commented
This is allow us to move off of Cisco Jabber to Teams
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Jennifer Graves commented
You got my vote. I would love this to be added on to provide an easier communication workflow with other teams/departments on the fly. Currently I can enter a name in Skype and begin communication in 3 clicks real time. With Teams Chat there are more steps to get begin communicating to a new contact(s) that are not pre-loaded, 5 steps before communication begins and slower response time with each step.
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Jamie Thomson commented
Like this idea. I posted a similar suggestion over here: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/40520137-send-a-chat-message-to-everyone-in-a-group-e-g-d Its not exactly the same but it is very similar.
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Pownas commented
This was possible in Skype fb, and is a show stopper for us.
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Luis Fajardo commented
For a call center environment, when workforce team needs to communicate at once with a lot of people for broadcast messages or agents need to communicate with the workforce team on a private one-time chat, skype for business chat functionality works perfect. MS Teams is lacking on this regard.
Given Microsoft's plans of stopping SfB in 2021 is concerning. We are unable to move all our employees to Teams because of this reason.
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Rodney LeGrand commented
Agreed!
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Bob Shevchuck commented
Would like to have Teams feature in uservoice.
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Anonymous commented
I vote for this! We have several departments who used this feature all the time in Skype for notifications during confidential weekly production processes. The AD dist list ensured that membership in the group chat remained tightly controlled for security.
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Anonymous commented
Yes, please bring this functionality back!
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Dawn commented
Are there any updates on this feature? This is very critical to be able to use Teams for important notifications/broadcasts to groups where sending an email is not enough. For example, if there is a system outage and you need to notify a specific group of people (that you are not a member of) via IM so any user in the group who is online can see it and take action to resolve it. It is also necessary to be able to see the group membership and directly contact a resource who is currently online. This can be done in SFB by adding the group/DL to your contacts. This is a major limitation of Teams and we have not been able to find any no good workarounds to provide this functionality. There are several requests of this nature and none have any responses from Microsoft yet.
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Krishna commented
We had this option in SFB, very useful to have it in Teams also.
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akhlak commented
This is indeed a very useful feature. Please enable this on MS Teams.
We have been using this feature to chat to DG from other groups and team when needed. Loss of this feature will be a critical loss. -
sandeep commented
I vote for this. Please enable the feature to add Distribution DG to a chat instead of adding person by person to a chat
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Anonymous commented
I am also facing similar issue with Microsoft Team, We are helpdesk and we have our DG which user use to chat with our agent via skype and it is working fine over skype. However there is not functionality in Microsoft team to use DG just like skype which is impacting the user experience. As you cannot find DG in Microsoft Teams and cannot connect with live chat agent until thy search for specific person which is an extra task for user to search the available analyst to connect with... Appreciate if you can fix this asap.
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Cee commented
Yes, I very much want this feature to be added. You can chat with an AD distribution group in Skype For Business, not having this in Teams is a notable loss of functionality.
All employees in our department are members of every Teams group for information and document sharing, but sometimes I need to chat with our own workgroups and not everyone with rights to our team/channel.
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Vignesh commented
This will be a great feature to add Distribution lists for the group chats and helps a lot for adhoc discussions that is not part of the channels. Please have this feature added.