Separate Individual chats from Meeting chats
One of the biggest issues I have with Teams is individual chats getting lost among the meeting chats. Many of the meetings are things we get pulled into that I don't care about to start with. Manually having to hide 5-10 of these a day is tedious. When I'm on the Chat tab, I'd like to see individual chats. When I'm on the Meetings tab, I would expect to see Meeting chats. If nothing else, maybe a dropdown filter to choose which chats to show on the Chat tab would suffice.

38 comments
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Steve Bennett commented
Completely agree. I would never want to go looking for a chat with a person at the same time as for a chat from a meeting. Simply adding a filter choice would be excellent and easy.
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Anonymous commented
Wholeheartedly agree! Often times the meeting chats are "sorry I need to leave for another meeting" etc. This is why I'm hanging onto Skype Chat as long as possible. It was suggested that I pin the individual chats, which only works for people who have already reached out to me. But for new individuals reaching out to me, they would get lost in the meeting chat. I have so many meetings a day and I would prefer to keep up with my work an individual chats than the sludge through the meeting chats which often are not as urgent.
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Anonymous commented
So desperately need this. There is WAY too much noise in the chat tab. Need 2 tabs for chats: individual chats vs meeting chats.
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Anonymous commented
A design flaw that needs to be resolved. It's too easy to send a message intended for one recipient to a whole group of additional stakeholders.
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Larina Swartz commented
How are we supposed to effectively use teams chat without this feature/design flaw fixed? They are removing support for Skype in July 2021. My company is fully moving us to teams chat by May 1. Microsoft needs to serious consider fixing this or extending the support for skype. Teams chat is useless the way it is currently designed.
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Anonymous commented
Fully agree. I am working with many customers and projects. i do have more meeting chats we even never used from short calls then individual chats. it is horrible to find the chats i need. Please add urgently a tab or filter. I am from a huge software company, knowing that this is an easy feature to add.
Beside, when running meetings the performance of teams gets horrible, even worse when activating video. I love teams, but that has to be solved, it stops me from being efficient. -
Anonymous commented
i am not allowing Skype to go away until this is implemented in teams. period.
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Matt Campbell commented
Two years later and this is more of a problem than ever. If I don't have a chat "pinned", then I am completely unable to find it because it has been pushed out of the Recent list by all my meetings. I can filter to see ONLY meetings, but I cannot filter to see only IMs.
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GG commented
all filters including meetings-specific filter should be negatable in order to exclude meeting chats (or whatever you are negating)
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J Carneal commented
This fix needs to be top priority. The lack of ability to filter out meeting chats from the chat pane basically makes Teams unusable. At this point, I'm thinking of having a private Slack account with some of my colleagues to use for chat instead of using Teams at work, because the meetings feature overwhelms chat every day. This is a critical design flaw in Teams.
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Anonymous commented
still, after 2 years, no signs of resolving this design flaw?
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Anonymous commented
Agreed on the private chat ability in a shared meeting setting.
Here’s a use case: We’re in a meeting with 40 folks sharing a video. We want the ability to comment on the video in a shared experience but the presenter sharing the video will also see an banner of all chats which is more disruptive and less engaging. It takes away from the interaction because now folks do not want to disturb the shared projection with their chats.
I would like the chat to be its own stream separate from the main shared content.
I also want the ability to privately chat with individuals in large meetings.
I would like Microsoft to envision Teams with a larger use case. -
Praveenraj Naveen commented
Its annoying that when someone accidentally types in a meeting chat, by mistaking it for individual chat.
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Mo Yousef commented
yes please add this filter. it is so confusing as each call becomes a convo that dies slowly and just push down more important convos
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KMH commented
I agree. I only want meeting chats during the meeting and if for some reason I want to view them again I can go to the meeting invite and view the chat for that meeting. No need to have this clutter up my chat window.
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Anonymous commented
Please get this feature, much much required.
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Darrell Davis commented
A simple solution would be to make a separate "section" within the chat tab - like pinned chats - that will have all of the meeting chats in it. That would make them separate from recent personal chats.
Or the "Conversations" filter (exclude meetings) that C.R. has mocked up in his comment below (I really like that one!). -
Saravana Kumar Sundarraj commented
Much needed feature! Need it more today with increased virtual meetings due to remote working.
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Aristides commented
I agree with moving the meeting chats into the meetings tab. Maybe even sub tab. Also, there is a to close the meeting chat after the meeting is over. So they don't become extra communication channels.
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C.R. commented
I have attached a dead-simple mockup that solves this problem easily.