Delete Private Chat threads
This request is for the ability to completely delete a private chat thread. (Not hide/archive.)
Again, this was pulled out into its own topic because it is still under review and no decision has been made.
To recap what has already been completed from the other topic:
- Delete your own messages anywhere in Teams.
- Team Owners can choose if users can edit/delete in their tenant as well as choose if admins have the power to delete any message posted in public channels.
- The ability to hide your private chat threads (these are not the chat threads in channels, but the private chat threads that appear when you click the Chat icon on the left-side app bar).
- The ability to mute your private chat threads. (these are not the chat threads in channels, but the private chat threads that appear when you click the Chat icon on the left-side app bar).
This topic deserves consideration and separating out hot items is something we have often done. Please don't think of this as an attempt to diminish the ask, we know that many people want this.
Thank you for your understanding and feedback.
-Warren
Warren
shared this idea
Thank you for your feedback! The team has finalized the designs for this feature request, and work is planned to begin shortly. We will share an update as soon as one is available.
2078 comments
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June Holen-Gabrielsen
commented
Any news?
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Brad Stokes
commented
This request has been active by Teams users now for a very long time (months). It should have been a common function included from the beginning! Please give users the option to delete an entire chat! It's been in the "planning" stages forever now. What possible reason can you have to not get this done?
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Bear
commented
Any progress on that? It's been 4 months since the 'Design is finalized'.
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Romain AYACHE
commented
pouvons-nous avoir un état d'avancement sur cette fonctionnalité ? cela commence à devenir urgent pour beaucoup de monde vis-à-vis des consignes GDPR et CNIL
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Zero Cold
commented
I need my privacy!!!
I see no reason not to be able to delete entire chats from history. I don't like that someone can see my chat with out my permission even more if this person were my manager, I need my privacy!!!I used to like teams but now I'm seriously thinking to change it for the whole company in case you didn't add (delete the whole chat conversation) soon!
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ER Santos
commented
Hi Alex
We would like to reuse the same meeting link for a regularly scheduled meeting. But chat messages from the previous meeting is still there. We would like to treat each meeting as a new meeting. Being able to delete the whole chat message would really help. Hope this will be considered as well. Thanks! -
Sheree Martin
commented
Thank you - looking forward to this change. It is detracting from
Productivity, not adding! Too much clutter -
Anonymous
commented
حذف الرسايل من الفرق
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S. Loggins
commented
This will be quietly closed as "Completed" and it will be an Admin ability to allow users to delete chats, or not. And nothing will change at the user level.
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Terry
commented
Any updates on this? Been 3 months since the last update. Would love to know how plans are developing. Thanks!
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Brendie
commented
I think you should always be in control to delete your own chat. Especially when it comes to an environment with work. Human resources are also confidential and if you communicate that over the chat it must be 100% privacy protected. As long as you work online and can't delete it, it's not 100% protected. I am not convinced that this is AVG protected. I am not convinced my boss can not read my chat's.
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Anonymous
commented
as new user of teams, imagine how nice it is to do meeting where you share your desktop, and you forget that your teams chat is up. Just imagine the conversations that you don't want to be seen by some people, even for a few seconds. I should be able as a user to delete my entire chat conversation or not.
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Magdi Elsayed
commented
I second Stuart's comment on August 25th, 2021. We have implemented the supervised chat policy, which is very useful and allows us to keep the chat functionality of Teams available for quick communication between students and teachers, or groups of students provided a teacher is also in the chat. However, it is not applied retroactively to chats that students already had open before applying the policy. The policy mechanism needs to do the same for chats that are already open, with the same error message popping up to the student and only allowing new messages to be added to the chat if a teacher, or "Full Permissions" user is brought into the chat.
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Stuart Gray
commented
Agree with comments below that we need a roadmap/timeline of this release for planning purposes.
"Supervised Chat" has been released to restrict student use of Private chat in Teams to require a staff member present, but without a way to delete old chat threads, this functionality is useless for school boards/districts that previously had chat enabled for students.
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S. Loggins
commented
Last year, I was concerned more about privacy. But at this point, I would just like to delete old messages so the application itself isn't so SLOW.
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Firas
commented
Will the administrators have the ability to delete private chats of the users?
What is the roadmap for this feature?
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Guillaume HOARAU
commented
Teams is available for everybody now and with my personal email (@msn.com) i can delete chats xD
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Naz
commented
Deleting a chat or thread should have been a default feature of MST. Could you please add this in as soon as possible.
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GOLDEN FEEDBACK
commented
Due to ignorance, some in comments are asking: Is this feature really important? (as there is a hide chat feature already in Teams)
The answer is, it is crucial. I am not an IT networking expert, but at least I know the basics.
Why is this constantly being ignored since many years?
It is because, Microsoft staff is afraid and is frequently citing legal and compliance reasons, and will continue to simply assure the users that this request is being worked on.1. Okay, everyone knows that in almost every organization, all data gets backed up on servers, cloud, SharePoint, etc (including Teams data). This is absolutely FINE, keep it there on powerful servers, for legal and compliance reasons, for admin e-discovery, audit, etc.
But please spare the standard work laptops (local device resources and memory). Most can open the task manager in Windows and check for themselves, if they think I am lying, on how Teams impacts system resources and other running apps, even in devices with good specifications.
2. Assume I have to search a unique word in just a dozen chats in Teams, but I have 100 other temporary irrelevant chats, then Teams scans ALL, archived or hidden chats, and it freezes or takes forever to show the result.
If we can DELETE irrelevant chats, instead of archiving or hiding (which uses memory and system resources) then both the application and the device will have improved performance.
3. Also, in case of migrating teams to another device or reinstalling on same device, it will be significantly faster and responsive, without having to copy 10,000 irrelevant chats (if any) from local device backup or server backup which wastes time, resources and even internet bandwidth, costs.
So, keep all the employees info, chat info, stories, shared files info on powerful servers/cloud, shared folders, etc; but allow the chats deletion on local device, and for LOVE'S SAKE, don't portray this as 'hard delete', rather consider it just like a 'clear cache' by deleting temporary chats at the device level.
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S
commented
A user Emmaline commented below: Highlighted the ongoing assurance since more than 1 year... I will use the same message to reiterate, as it is very clear and factual, couldn't have said better:
Dear Alex and Team,
I really don't understand why it has to take this long to finalise a decision for users to have the ability to delete chats and group chats? This is such a SIMPLE request (compared to the many complex ones out there!) and considering the volume of requests and votes by users submitted to have this feature, and this has been suggested since last year, you would think this should have been enabled by this time.Just so we're clear, we don't just want the ability to hide or mute chat threads, but the ability to DELETE ANY chat, group or channel thread created by ourselves ANYWHERE on Teams.
Please please action this feature soon!