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Users Can Add Teams Custom Emojis for Everyone to Share
Borrowing a tad from Slack (which has had the ability to upload custom emojis for years), message center notification MC795750 (updated 31 May 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 80659) announces that Teams users will soon be able to add custom emojis and reactions by uploading image (PNG) or GIF files. Once uploaded, custom emojis are accessible to everyone in the tenant, which can support a maximum of 5,000 custom emojis.
Microsoft plans to make the feature available to targeted release tenants in late June 2024. General availability will follow in early July 2024 with GCC High and DoD tenants getting custom emojis in August 2024.
Custom Emojis On By Default
The ability to upload custom emojis is controlled by the CreateCustomEmojis setting in Teams messaging policies. Microsoft plans to ship the feature enabled, meaning that the setting should be True in all messaging policies. There will also be a setting in the Teams admin cenrer to disable or enable custom emojis tenant-wide.
Here’s how to use the Get-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy cmdlet from the MicrosoftTeams PowerShell module to check the values for the CreateCustomEmojis (create and upload new emojis) and DeleteCustomEmojis (delete custom emojis) settings.
Get-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy | Format-Table identity, *emojis* Identity CreateCustomEmojis DeleteCustomEmojis -------- ------------------ ------------------ Global False False Tag:Advanced True False Tag:Advanced Users True False Tag:Restricted - No Chat True False
You need the latest version of the MicrosoftTeams module to manage custom emojis.
To turn custom emojis off, run the Set-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy cmdlet to update messaging policies. In this example, custom emojis are disabled for any account assigned the Advanced messaging policy.
Set-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy -Identity Advanced -CreateCustomEmojis $false -DeleteCustomEmojis $false
Teams admin center receives an update in June (Figure 1) to allow administrators to manage the emoji settings in messaging policies without using PowerShell. Global and Teams administrators can delete custom emojis no matter what the messaging policy assigned to their account dictates.
Adding a Custom Emoji
To add a custom emoji, open the emoji and reactions menu and select the custom category (to the far right side of the other categories). If your account is allowed to add a custom emoji, you’ll see a plus sign. Click the plus sign to select the file for the new emoji. Only PNG and GIF files are supported. I took a photo from a recent trip to Disney World featuring a certain mouse and edited it to isolate the mouse character. I then saved the file as a PNG. Microsoft doesn’t say if the file should be under a certain size, but I took no chances and made sure that it was less than a megabyte. I uploaded the file and Teams invited me to name the emoji (Figure 2). You can see in the preview how the emoji will look in different situations.
Guest accounts cannot add a custom emoji. However, they can use the custom emojis created by tenant members. Seeing the custom emojis in a host tenant gives an interesting insight into the culture of that organization (Figure 3).
Deleting a Custom Emoji
Once uploaded, custom emojis become available to all users and show up in the custom section. Users granted the ability to remove custom emojis can select and delete emojis from the same place (Figure 4).
Microsoft says that it can take up to 24 hours for a deleted emoji to disappear.
Prepare for Some Interesting Teams Custom Emojis
On May 31, 2024, Microsoft updated MC795750 to say that the custom emojis feature will not come to organizations with education licenses. I think this is a reasonable decision. There’s no doubt that teachers have better things to do than keep an eye out for inapproptiate emojis appearing in chats and channels.
In the corporate world, based on experience with Slack, it’s probable that organizations will see a surprising array of custom emojis appear after users discover that this capability exists (and they will, and fast). Some custom emojis will be marvelously witty; others will be scandalous and offensive. With up to five thousand custom emojis per tenant, there’s lots of room to experiment with all sorts of images. Let the games commence.
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