Shared Tab for Files and Hyperlinks Replaces Files

Message center notification MC800850 (11 June 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 396169) is about another tweak Microsoft is making to the user interface of the new Teams client. On the surface, renaming the Files tab in Chat to be Shared is an innocuous change, but the update goes deeper.

The update is for the Teams Windows and Mac desktop clients and the browser client, and the new software will roll out to targeted tenants in early July 2024. General availability will follow soon afterward, and full worldwide deployment should be complete by the end of July. As with any date, don’t declare success until you see the change appear in your tenant.

The Shared Tab

The Files tab is a shortcut to allow users to see and access the files shared in a chat. It is a default tab for Chat and cannot be removed by users. The Files tab served its purpose, but the simple fact is that other objects, notably hyperlinks, are also commonly shared in chats. The new Shared tab exposes both files and hyperlinks in what Microsoft calls “a new, richer format” (code for a slightly nicer listing layout). The tab is available in one-to-one and group chats with tenant members and guests. It is not available in federated chats (with people in other tenants).

Figure 1 shows the new Shared tab in use in a chat between myself and Vasil Michev, who’s a guest in my tenant. We share many hyperlinks in the chat, including Graph API URIs, which are probably less exciting than links to documents or websites.

When a chat participant opens the Shared tab, Teams fetches the most recent items. It seems like Teams tries to find files and hyperlinks shared in the last two months, but you can scroll back to find older files. During testing, I could find files and hyperlinks back as far as December 2020, which seems reasonable. This might or might not have been the first time I shared something in the chat, but 42 months later I can’t remember!

No Change in Channels

Microsoft is not changing the Files tab for channels. This tab serves a completely different purpose because it lists the files in the channel’s SharePoint Online folder. The focus for the Files channels tab is to maintain feature parity with the SharePoint browser interface. Teams has steadily improved this position over the years and the two are pretty close now.

Future Updates for the Shared Tab

Microsoft says that they will enable image previews for hyperlinks and a keyword search facility in the Shared tab “soon after the rollout.” The keyword search seems to be available now (Figure 2), so perhaps plans changed after the message center notification was written.

Microsoft also discusses the next version of the Shared tab that includes support for media links (images, videos, GIFs, etc.). No dates are given for “soon” or the next version.

Change Doesn’t Please Everyone

Sometimes people complain when Microsoft introduces features that don’t seem to be as important from a business or technology perspective. Certainly, I received plenty of feedback on that point after writing about custom emojis. I don’t think custom emojis are very important to Teams, but others obviously do.

The thing to remember is that the Teams development group serves a very large installed base of over 320 million monthly active users. The base spans very large enterprise tenants like Accenture and Microsoft. It also includes a mix of small businesses, educational, and government tenants. All have their own demands and priorities. This change will please some and annoy others. It’s just the nature of software development.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

New Share Someone’s Contact Info Option in Mentions Menu

Announced in message center notification MC704192 (5 January 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 375627), users can share contact information for other people in Teams chat. The feature will roll out to targeted release tenant in mid-January 2024 and to standard release tenants in early February 2024. Everyone should have the feature by the end of February 2024. As always, announced dates can change if unexpected hitches appear.

I’m not sure that the new share someone’s contact feature makes “it easy for others to confidently get to know other collaborators” as proclaimed by Microsoft (maybe this phrase was generated by Microsoft 365 Copilot?), but it is useful, especially in large organizations where it can be a challenge to understand who does what and make contact with them, even with the aid of the organization explorer in Outlook and Teams, especially if user information in the directory are incomplete or inaccurate.

Personal Recommendations

A personal recommendation is always great when you’re looking for someone to help with a problem. That’s the basic concept behind giving Teams the ability to share contact information in a chat. You know someone who can help, so you give a co-worker the information they need to contact that person.

Sharing of contact information is supported for Teams one-to-one and group chats. The implementation is in the mentions menu, so type @ in the compose box. The option to share someone’s contact info is revealed (Figure 1).

You can now select whose contact information to share and insert it into the chat message (Figure 2). Contact information for member accounts belonging to the tenant can be shared. This includes member account synchronized through participation in a multi-tenant organization (MTO). A chat message can include multiple contact entries. Users whose contact details are shared don’t receive notifications.

Guest user accounts are unsupported. This is possibly because the contact information for guest accounts is usually sparse

Viewing Contact Information

Figure 3 shows three mentions of people in a chat. The new share contact information feature created the first two. The last is an @mention for a guest account created with the old Teams client.

The first two mentions have a contact icon prefix to show recipients that these are shared contacts rather than an @mention. You can only @mention someone who’s part of a chat. The mention is intended to let the person know that this message is of special interest to them. In many cases, an @mention is a request for the person to do something. By contrast, any chat participant can share someone else’s contact information without that person being a member of the chat. Clicking on a link to either a contact card or an @mention displays the profile card for the user.

You can’t use the share contact info feature to share your own details. This is logical because the chat participants can find your contact information by clicking on your picture in the participant list. If you want to share your contact information proactively, you can copy and paste it into the chat.

Teams channel conversations don’t support a share contact info feature. This might be because publishing a contact makes it available to everyone in the team, which is more of a public rather than a personal recommendation. Anyone in the team membership now or in the future would be able to see the contact information.

A chat is a more closed space and the chat history can be restricted so that people who join a chat don’t see previous messages. An argument can be made that lots of confidential information is shared in channel conversations. That’s true, and if you want to share contact information, you can do so by copying the information from the person’s profile card and sharing it (or a screen shot of the profile card) in a channel post.

Small But Useful Change

The Share contact info feature is a small but useful change that will probably be most valuable inside large organizations where it’s hard to keep track of what others do. It’s obviously a response to a customer request.

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Teams Delete Chat Option Helps Users Cleans up Their Chat Lists

Message center notification MC466199 (12 November) announces the arrival of the Delete Chat feature in the Teams Chat app. When deployed, users can delete their access to 1:1, group, and meeting chats (except webinar events). This is Microsoft 365 roadmap item 90723. The code is scheduled to roll out in early December 2022 in the Teams desktop, browser (including the PWA client), and mobile clients.

After six years of Teams, it’s reasonably safe to say that many people have cluttered chat lists that have grown over time. In my post about seven habits for effective use of Teams, I recommend pinning your most important chats to the top of the chat list. However, over time, chat lists grow, and chaos begins to develop under the 15 pinned chats. The delete chat feature allows users to clean up their chat list by removing chats that are long since over or those that are no longer of interest.

The Teams Delete Chat Option

To delete a chat, select the […] menu and look for the Delete chat option (Figure 1). The option is available if permitted by the Teams messaging policy assigned to the user account (see below).

Before deleting a chat, Teams warns the user that “You need to delete anything that you’ve shared (files, tasks, etc.) separately.” In other words, Teams only cleans up its messages and leaves anything else intact. This makes sense because files shared in a chat, like the OneDrive files that underpin Loop components, might be used elsewhere (for instance, the user might have copied the Loop component into an Outlook message). If Teams removed everything, it could break a lot of things, so it’s better to leave well alone.

Deleting and Leaving Chats

All participants in a Teams chat share the chat’s message thread. Anyone in a group chat has equal rights over the content, meaning for instance that they can eject someone from the chat. When someone deletes a chat, they remove their access to the chat. However, everyone else involved in the chat retains full access and can continue collaborating in the chat.

Deleting a chat is different to leaving a group or meeting chat. When someone leaves a chat, they retain access to all messages posted to that chat up to the point that they left. In addition, the chat also remains in their chat list, so leaving a chat doesn’t help to clean up the chat list. The leave option isn’t available for 1:1 chats.

Hiding a chat removes it from the chat list but leaves the chat intact. However, if someone else in the chat posts a message, Teams unhides the chat and restores it to the place it previously had in the chat list. Hiding a chat is not a way to clean up the chat list.

Users who delete a group chat can rejoin it later if one of the remaining participants adds them to the chat. The rejoin happens automatically in 1:1 chats if the other person sends a message (essentially, this action starts a new chat). In all cases, when someone rejoins a chat, they do not regain access to previous messages, and they can only see messages posted after they rejoined the chat. There’s no way to restore access to the chats posted prior to the user deleting their access to the chat.

Administrator Controls

The AllowUserDeleteChat setting in the Teams messaging policy controls if users see the Delete Chat option in the menu. By default, the setting is True, meaning that users can delete chats. The setting is updatable through the Teams admin center or PowerShell. In this example, we list all messaging policies to review the setting:

Get-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy | Format-Table Identity, AllowUserDeleteChat

Identity                                    AllowUserDeleteChat
--------                                    -------------------
Global                                                     True
Tag:Advanced                                               True
Tag:Advanced Users                                         True
Tag:Restricted - No Chat                                   True

The set of policies contains a messaging policy that doesn’t allow access to the chat app. It makes sense to disable the delete chat option for the policy, which we do as follows:

Set-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy -Identity "Restricted - No Chat" -AllowUserDeleteChat $False

Many Ways to Control Chats

The Teams Delete chat option joins the other ways available to users to control their participation in chats. They can continue as normal, mute notifications, or hide, leave, or delete the chat. The subtle differences between each option might pass some people by. Some coaching might be necessary to help users understand how best to manage chats and chat lists.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

New Spacing Option for Teams Chat

Announced on January 28, Microsoft released the ability for users to choose between “Comfy” (the default) and “Compact” (the new option) spacing for Teams chat messages. Figure 1 shows how compact spacing uses less screen than the traditional layout. The idea is to give users more control over how they view chat messages. You can see that the new layout left-aligns all messages and compresses the space between messages to allow more chats to appear on-screen. Another difference is that the comfy format includes timestamps whereas the compact does not.

I prefer the compact layout because it makes more efficient use of space. However, I know that others are quite happy with the comfy layout, perhaps because they’re accustomed to it or because they’ve got a big screen where space isn’t at a premium. Some also like having chat responses from other users indented. Style and design are very subjective.

Given normal practice, the compact spacing option should be generally available in a matter of weeks. As of now, there’s no trace of the option turning up in Teams consumer – at least, not in the software included in Windows 11.

Update February 1: Microsoft documented the feature in MC320165 and say that compact spacing fits 50% more chats on-screen. This is roadmap item 88064. Deployment begins to standard tenants in mid-February.

Selecting the Spacing Option

The setting to control chat spacing is available in Teams settings (Figure 2) for users configured to use the preview version of Teams.

Compact chat spacing is available in the Teams desktop client for Windows, Mac, and Linux as well as the browser client. I found that I had to select the compact option in the browser after setting it in the desktop. However, this might be a preview issue which Microsoft will fix before general availability.

Compact spacing for chat messages isn’t available in the mobile clients where screen real estate is usually more limited. Given that Teams is essentially a web application, it looks as if the application of compact spacing is controlled by changing the relevant style sheet. If you have guest accounts in other tenants, the spacing setting must be selected in each tenant.

Compact Spacing Unavailable for Channel Conversations

Spacing applies only to chat messages; it isn’t available for messages posted to channel conversations, possibly because channel posts tend to be longer and more involved, meaning that application of more compact spacing doesn’t have the same effect as in the cut-and-thrust interaction typical of chats.

However, the theory that channel conversations are longer is challenged by the presence of Microsoft Loop components in chats, which encourage longer and more sustained interactions in components like paragraphs and checklists. As Figure 3 shows, the internal formatting of loop components isn’t affected by compact spacing while the reduced space between the components is not very obvious.

Hide for Me Available in Preview

Microsoft also announced that the Hide for Me feature, expected to roll out in late January (according to MC310349) is available in preview. The feature removes the user from the gallery of participant cards shown during meetings. It’s deemed helpful because user attention is no longer drawn to checking what other people see in their video feed. It’s certainly something that has attracted positive comment from Teams users and now preview users can try Hide for Me out.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

Teams External Access for Chat and Calling

Teams users have been able to chat and call people in other Teams tenants for some years. This is a very useful capability because it means that you don’t need to have a guest account in a tenant to communicate with its users. Microsoft added the capability to chat with Skype consumer users in 2020. Both features are enabled by external federation, the component which manages user ability to communicate outside the tenant. By default, the tenant external federation configuration allows communication with Teams users in any tenant. Administrators can manage the configuration through the External access section under Users in the Teams admin center. For instance, an organization might decide to limit external federation to a subset of tenants considered necessary for business communications.

Bringing Teams Consumer into the Chat Fold

Message center notification MC296208 (updated January 4, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 88381) expands external federation to cover chat (but not calling) with Teams consumer users. Given the presence of a Teams consumer client in Windows 11 and Microsoft’s fervent hope that people will embrace Teams consumer, it’s unsurprising that consumer and enterprise Teams users should be able to communicate. Up to now, any attempt to chat with a Teams enterprise user from Teams consumer results in an exchange of email, which is not quite the immediate connection delivered by chat.

According to MC296208, roll-out of Teams external access for Teams consumer starts in early January and should complete in mid-January. As always, this timing might change. Unlike external federation with Skype consumer users, Teams consumer supports both 1:1 and group chats. Another interesting aspect is that Teams enterprise users can find Teams consumer users with their email address or phone number (obviously, this must be the phone number registered by the user when they signed up for Teams consumer). But then again, you can also search for Teams enterprise users with their phone number, if you really must…

Tenant Controls for Teams External Access with Teams Consumer

Settings in the tenant’s external federation configuration control the communication with Teams consumer users (also called “Teams accounts not managed by an organization”). Two controls are available in the External access section of the Teams admin center:

• People in my organization can communicate with Teams users whose accounts aren’t managed by an organization: Set On to allow your users to communicate with Teams consumer users.
• External users with Teams accounts not managed by an organization can contact users in my organization: Set On to allow Teams external users to search for and contact users in your tenant using their SIP address (usually the same as their primary SMTP address and user principal name). Set Off to stop this happening and prevent unsolicited contact from Teams consumer users. Figure 1 shows that this setting is Off.

By default, both settings are On, meaning that if you don’t update them, full bi-directional chat is available between Teams enterprise and consumer users.

You can also update the Teams consumer controls with PowerShell by running the Set-CsTenantFederationConfiguration cmdlet. For example, this command disables both settings.

# Disable both outbound access (AllowTeamsConsumer) and inbound access (AllowTeamsConsumerInbound) for Teams consumer users
Set-CsTenantFederationConfiguration -AllowTeamsConsumer $False -AllowTeamsConsumerInbound $False

Other settings in the external federation configuration include:

• AllowFederatedUsers: Set to False to stop chat and calling with Teams users in other tenants.
• AllowPublicUsers: Set to False to stop chat and calling with Skype Consumer users.

Per-User Control for External Federation

The Teams external access policy assigned to an account controls the level of external access a user has.

Get-CsonlineUser -Identity Jane.Sixsmith@office365itpros.com | Select ExternalAccessPolicy  

ExternalAccessPolicy            : FederationAndPICDefault

Get-CsExternalAccessPolicy -Identity FederationAndPICDefault

Identity                          : Global
Description                       :
EnableFederationAccess            : True
EnableXmppAccess                  : False
EnablePublicCloudAccess           : True
EnablePublicCloudAudioVideoAccess : True
EnableOutsideAccess               : True
EnableAcsFederationAccess         : True
EnableTeamsConsumerAccess         : True
EnableTeamsConsumerInbound        : True

If an external access policy isn’t defined for an account, it uses the tenant settings.

Important settings for federated communications defined in the external access policy are:

• EnableFederationAccess: Allow communication with Teams users in other tenants.
• EnablePublicCloudAccess: Allow communication with Skype consumer users.
• EnableTeamsConsumerAccess: Allow communication with Teams consumer users.
• EnableTeamsConsumerInbound: Allow Teams consumer users to initiate communication with this account.

To gain maximum control over how Teams users communicate externally, you might want to create a new external access policy. This is done as follows:

• Create a new external access policy with New-CsExternalAccessPolicy.
• Update the settings in the new policy with Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy.
• Assign the new policy to user accounts.

For example:

New-CsExternalAccessPolicy -Identity "Block Teams Consumer"
Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy -Identity "Block Teams Consumer" -EnableTeamsConsumerAccess $False
Grant-CsExternalAccessPolicy -Identity Jane.Sixsmith@office365itpros.com -PolicyName "Block Teams Consumer"

Teams External Access with Teams Consumer

Once permitted, it’s easy for a Teams enterprise user to connect with a Teams consumer user by starting a new chat, entering the email address of the consumer user, and searching externally. The initial messages go to the external user, who must decide if they wish to accept or block the connection (Figure 2).

You can add a Teams consumer user to a group chat, but you can’t share previous chats as a new chat starts to accommodate the external user.

A similar check before acceptance is used when a Teams consumer user contacts a Teams enterprise user, with the subtle difference that the Teams enterprise user sees the warning that Messages from unknown or unexpected people could be spam or phishing attempts.

Recipients of inbound connections can preview the messages, which is a good reason for clearly stating the intent and purpose of the conversation in the initial messages, unlike those shown in Figure 3. Only a contravention of the don’t say hello in chat rule would be worse!

Some limitations exist in what can happen in a mixed-Teams chat. The biggest loss of functionality is the inability to make calls or share files. Given that Teams users can call Skype consumer users, the loss of calling is surprising (I anticipate this feature will come soon). Not being able to share files is likely because enterprise and consumer Teams use different versions of OneDrive.

From a compliance perspective, the Microsoft 365 substrate captures compliance records for eDiscovery in the enterprise tenant. Teams consumer doesn’t have this capability. On a more serious note, Microsoft documents that Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies don’t apply to external access chats. If you’ve invested in DLP for Teams (which needs Office 365 or advanced compliance licenses), you’re unlikely to be impressed at the prospect that tenant users can share sensitive information in external chats. This is definitely a hole which Microsoft should close.

Generally, all went as expected. The only issue I ran into was when attempting to connect to an account signed into Teams consumer that I had previously communicated with from Teams using Skype consumer. Teams stubbornly refused to communicate using anything other than Skype consumer. There’s nothing wrong with the Teams consumer account because I was able to connect with it in a group chat when another enterprise account added the consumer account to the chat.

Connections for Those Who Want Them

I’m unsure as to how many Teams consumer accounts are ready to use Teams external access to communicate with enterprise tenants. Sure, the client is in Windows 11 and many people might have kicked the tires of the client but knowing how many persist and use Teams consumer on an ongoing basis is a different question. In any case, for those who use Teams consumer, the pathway to communication with their enterprise connections is now available. That is, if enterprise tenants enable the capability.

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Whiteboard Latest Consumer of OneDrive for Business

As first described in message center notification MC282992 (September 3, updated December 7), many whiteboard clients can now store and access files in OneDrive for Business instead of the original Azure data store. Given the popularity of whiteboard sharing in Teams meetings and the support of the new whiteboard storage in Teams, it’s likely that many files are now in OneDrive for Business (Figure 1), even if their owners don’t realize that the transition has happened.

Whiteboard isn’t the only Teams application which stores its files in OneDrive for Business. Others include:

• Loop components shared in Teams chat.
• Recordings of Teams personal meetings.
• Files shared in Teams chats.

This trend isn’t surprising. By design, Teams uses other Microsoft 365 components rather than creating its own, and responsibility for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online roll up under the same Microsoft executive (Jeff Teper). It’s natural for Teams-enabled applications to look to OneDrive as a natural target for file storage, especially as Microsoft makes liberal storage quotas available (here’s a script to report the storage used by OneDrive for Business accounts)

Administrative Challenge

Storing data in OneDrive for Business makes eminent sense. The challenge for administrators occurs when the time comes to delete a user account. By default, Microsoft 365 keeps the OneDrive for Business account for a deleted account for 30 days. You can increase this period to up to ten years (3650 days) by updating the retention setting in the SharePoint Online admin center (Figure 2).

During the retention period, anyone granted access to the OneDrive account can retrieve files. Once the retention period expires, Microsoft 365 removes the account permanently and the files become irretrievable. The exception being if the account or any of the files come under the control of a retention policy or label, in which case they remain in place until all retention controls expire.

The administrative challenge is to decide how to handle the OneDrive content for deleted accounts. One approach is to use the mechanism available to assign access to a deleted user’s OneDrive for Business account to another user (Figure 3). In essence, this makes the designated user the administrator of the OneDrive for Business account and allows them full control over anything stored in the account.

The intention is to give the designated user some time to review the information held in the deleted user’s account so that they can retrieve anything valuable from the account and store it somewhere else, like their own OneDrive for Business account or an appropriate SharePoint Online site. The mechanism works, but the obvious flaw is that once you move files out of their original location, you break the connection between Teams and objects. It’s possible to preserve sharing links when moving files from a OneDrive for Business account, but the link in chats will point to the wrong place and make attachments and loop components in Teams chats unusable, meeting recordings and whiteboards unavailable, and any “cloudy attachments” shared in email inaccessible. In short, users won’t be happy campers because they can’t get at information and help desks will be frustrated because they can’t do much about the underlying problem.

Retention a Better Answer

Instead of asking someone to go through the OneDrive for Business account of deleted users (a dispiriting job), a better approach is to use Microsoft 365 retention policies to retain information in OneDrive for Business accounts for an extended period. Unlike SharePoint Online, where storage quotas are more restrictive and expensive than OneDrive for Business, the effect of long-term retention isn’t a concern. With retention in place, after deleting user accounts, their documents and other files remain in place until the retention period expires. Assuming that the retention period is several years (after creation), this should be sufficient for people to recover copies of information or finish up working with objects like whiteboard or Loop components. At the same time, if someone needs to access the OneDrive account to remove or move files, they can, assuming everyone understands the consequences which ensure.

Of course, retention policies are only available if your organization has Office 365 E3 or better licenses. Organizations with licenses which don’t include retention policies are limited to harvesting information from deleted accounts before they disappear. However, there’s nothing to stop organizations using poor man’s retention by setting the retention period for OneDrive for Business to the maximum 3650 days. After all, ten years after the deletion of an account, who’s going to want to access a document, whiteboard, or loop component from such an antiquated repository?

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Available Now

Updated: 18 October 2023

The hoo-hah surrounding the announcement of the Microsoft Loop app at Microsoft’s Fall 2021 Ignite event missed a very important point. Microsoft released Loop (or Live) components in preview for Teams chat (November 30 update: Loop support in Teams chat is now generally available). When I originally wrote about Teams and Live components in July, Microsoft hoped to roll out the feature in mid-August. Perhaps the advent of the Microsoft Loop app delayed matters a tad, but I suspect that Microsoft also had other work to do to make loop/live/fluid components work smoothly in Teams. In any case, Loop components can now be used in chats. That is, if you remember to enable it for your tenant by running PowerShell, connecting to SharePoint Online, and updating the tenant configuration by executing the command:

Set-SPOTenant -IsFluidEnabled $True 

Based on what Microsoft said at Ignite, OWA is probably the next app to gain Loop components. Sometime in 2022, we’ll see the Microsoft Loop app and be better able to organize components in workspaces and pages.

Loop Components

Microsoft says that a loop component is an “atomic unit of productivity,” meaning that it’s designed to do one thing without reference to other components. Each component is a container for a type of information. Hence, we end up with the set of components available in Teams chat (Figure 1).

When you create a loop component in Teams chat, its physical representation is a file stored in your OneDrive for Business account. A chat message containing a Loop component used to be restricted to just that component, but now you can include other elements such as some text, emojis, and graphics.

When you send the chat message containing a loop component, its file is shared with the chat participants to allow them to edit the content and see updates as they occur. The sharing applied to loop components sent in Teams chat is the default sharing link defined in the SharePoint Online sharing policy for the organization. Obviously, you can edit the sharing link to use whatever permissions you want, subject to the settings in the sharing policy.

The dependency on OneDrive for Business means that guest users participating in a chat cannot create messages containing loop components. However, they can update loop components created and sent by tenant users.

Figure 2 shows three loop components, each in its own Teams chat message:

• Paragraph: a text box with some basic formatting capabilities (headings, bold, underline, strikethrough, bulleted list, numbered list. Insert web link). You can also paste graphics and add emojis, so life is good.
• To do list.
• Table.

Anyone used to Microsoft Office editors will be at home with inputting text into Loop components.

You can read and edit loop components in the Teams mobile client (iOS and Android). A small delay happens the first time you access a component, but afterwards the interaction is smooth (Figure 3).

Nested Loops

Another interesting aspects of loo[p components is that they can be nested. Type the slash key (/) when composing a loop and a pop-out menu appears (Figure 4) to allow you to choose a loop component to insert. You can insert as many loops a you like, with the exception being that it doesn’t seem like you can insert a paragraph inside another loop.

Loop Component Files in OneDrive

The fluid files (the containers used by Loop components) for Teams chats are in the Microsoft Teams Chat Files folder of the author’s OneDrive for Business account (Figure 5). When Loop components become more generally available in Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps, I anticipate that personal fluid files will remain in OneDrive (albeit in different folders, such as one used for components in messages sent by OWA) while shared components (like those in Teams channel messages) will be in SharePoint Online.

The synchronization used to make updates available to everyone with access to a loop component is like the autosave mechanism used by Office apps, but much faster. Possibly this is because synchronization occurs more often (as each character is typed) and process smaller amounts of data in each transaction.

Nested loops exist inside the host fluid file. Separate fluid files are not created for each of the components nested inside a loop.

Enabled Users Only

Users must be enabled for Loop and use a desktop or mobile client. If not, they’ll see that a Loop component is present in a chat but won’t see its content (Figure 6).

The user can click the link to access a read-only version of the content in a browser. The good news is that changes made by other users continue to synchronize to the browser to allow the user to see updates and who’s making the changes (Figure 7).

The browser interface is also invoked if you click on a fluid file in OneDrive. However, in this case, you can edit the component content.

Compliance Issues

When a user includes a loop component in Teams chat, the substrate generates a compliance record in the user’s Exchange Online mailbox. Unfortunately, the compliance record contains no content from the loop component. Instead, it’s just a pointer to the .fluid file stored in the user’s OneDrive for Business account. Microsoft Search does index these files, so they are included in results generated by content searches. I’ve updated my note about the difficulties involved in Teams backup to include this information.

Usable Preview

Loop components in Teams chat is a preview. As Teams is the first mainline application to incorporate loop components, you can expect to run into some glitches. However, the quality of the implementation is much improved over what I experienced after Microsoft originally announced Fluid components for Teams.

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Now in Preview for Teams Desktop with Browser Support Soon

On September 17, Microsoft announced the availability of the Teams chat quoted reply feature for chat messages for users configured to use Teams public preview (the cool kids with the P beside their user photo). The announcement is also covered in Microsoft 365 message center notification MC285886 (roadmap item 81113), which says that the feature roll-out starts in mid-September and should be complete in early October.

The preview announcement covers preview availability for the Teams desktop clients (Windows, Mac, and Linux) with the promise that quoted replies will soon be available for the Teams browser clients. MC285886 only covers the Teams desktop clients.

My reading is that the preview announcement is for people who want to use quoted replies early before general availability reaches their tenant. Don’t worry about using quoted replies before everyone else in your tenant has access to the feature. Other people will be able to read quoted replies (including in browser clients) even if they can’t send one back to you.

The Usefulness of Quoted Replies

A quoted reply is a concept familiar to users of other chat apps or indeed, email, where it’s long been possible to include some or all the content of a previous message in a response. According to Microsoft, a quoted reply “is a great way to add context and clarity with who you are conversing with whether it is a recent message or from one earlier in the conversation.”

Given the usefulness of quoted replies and the demand for the feature expressed by customers, it’s surprising that it’s taken Microsoft quite so long to introduce it in Teams on all platforms. For instance, WhatsApp has had quoted replies since June 2016. In passing, it’s nice to see that the Teams engineering group continues to respond to customers in Teams User Voice despite Microsoft’s decision to withdraw from the User Voice platform last March.

Quoted replies is limited to Teams chat. It’s available in 1:1, group, and meeting chat but not in channel conversations. Quoted replies have been available in the Teams mobile clients for a couple of months (Figure 1).

Composing Teams Chat Quoted Replies

To create a quoted reply, choose a message in a chat and select Reply from the […] menu (Figure 2). You can select any message you like from a chat, including those containing non-text content.

Teams extracts a snippet of about 200 text characters from the selected message and inserts it into the compose screen (aka reply text box) (Figure 3). You can then add whatever information you want to the reply before sending. Usually, this is some commentary on the original message. However, you can’t edit or add to the text inserted by Teams.

When the recipient reads the quoted reply, they see the inserted text plus your comments (Figure 4).

Clicking the quoted text brings the user to the original message in the thread. To make this navigation possible, Teams stores a link to the original message in the reply (but doesn’t display it). Navigation to the original only works for text messages. If you create a quoted reply for a message containing non-text information, like a pasted graphic, GIF, or adaptive card (like those generated by the Teams approvals app), navigation back to the original message might not be possible. In addition, the overall impact of the quoted reply isn’t quite what you expect because the recipient has no context about the original message (Figure 5).

Usually, Teams sends messages in HTML format. Quoted replies sent to federated Skype consumer or Skype for Business users are in plain text because federation doesn’t support HTML interconnectivity.

Compliance Information

Figure 6 shows an example of the HTML content captured in compliance records for quoted replies, including the identifier for the original message in the thread.

Because the compliance records capture the snippet of text inserted by Teams, eDiscovery searches find both the original messages and any quoted replies which match the search query. Figure 7 shows a quoted reply as displayed in the sample results retrieved by a content search.

So Long Coming but Very Welcome

Quoted replies is one of those small but useful features which make a difference. Once you start using it, you’ll wonder (again) why Microsoft took so long to include the feature and understand why many users resorted to manual workarounds (like this one) to create the effect. But let’s not complain too much. Quoted replies are now part of the Teams landscape. Let’s be grateful for that and move forward.

Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Block Teams Chat Restricts Fundamental Teams Functionality

A question posed in a Facebook forum asked how to go about disabling the chat function for Teams users. I don’t think this is a great idea. In fact, I think it’s silly to consider using Teams after disabling such a fundamental piece of its functionality. At its heart, Teams is a chat application and it makes little sense to remove Chat.

However, if you really insist on taking an axe to Teams, two approaches exist to disabling chat for a user:

• Create a Teams app setup policy without the Chat app and assign it to users.
• Create a Teams messaging policy with Chat disabled and assign it to users.

As you’ll see, the second is the more effective option.

Teams App Setup Policy Approach

You can think of Teams as a framework built from apps. Chat is an app (at least, it’s considered an app in the apps analytics report available in the Teams admin center). It’s therefore logical to think that you can create an app setup report which doesn’t include Chat and assign the policy to the users for whom you want to block Chat.

It’s simple to create a new App Setup Policy and remove Chat from the list of pinned apps. Figure 1 shows what the policy looks like. All the other standard apps like the Calendar are present, but Chat is missing.

After assigning the app setup policy to users, the next time the user signs into Teams (or the client refreshes its cache), Chat will disappear, and they’ll see something like Figure 2. The other standard apps are pinned to the left-hand navigation bar, but Chat isn’t.

Chatting Not Blocked

The problem is that this approach only removes Chat from the list of pinned apps. Users can still chat. For instance, if someone starts a chat with a blocked user, the blocked user will see a notification and can respond in the notification, which brings them to the Chat screen (Figure 3).

Chats are also possible elsewhere in Teams, such as in a meeting (Figure 4).

Or through the chat option in the people card (Figure 5).

Teams Messaging Policy Approach

Removing the Chat app might be viable if Chat is blocked for everyone in the organization. However, out of sight, out of mind isn’t a great strategy and too many places exist in Teams where Chat bubbles to the surface.

The right approach is to create a Teams messaging policy with the Chat option disabled (Figure 6).

After assigning the new policy to users, they will lose access to Chat and won’t see the app in the navigation bar and the chat icon disappears from their people card.

But the real difference comes when someone attempts to contact one of the blocked users. At this point, Teams detects that the user can’t use Chat and signals that fact (Figure 7). You could argue about the informational text chosen by Microsoft (maybe “An organization policy blocks chat for this user” would be better), but the simple fact is that this is a more effective block.

Blocking Meeting Chat

So far we’ve covered how to block the Chat app to stop users participating in personal and group chats. Teams also supports meeting chats, which are effectively a form of group chat between meeting participants.

Because meeting chats are associated with online meetings rather than individual users, they are governed by Teams meeting policies. If you want to stop chat in meetings, you must update the Teams meeting policies assigned to participants to disable the Allow chat in meetings setting (Figure 8).

Stopping Chats is Possible – But Still Bad

Even though it’s possible to remove Chat, it’s still a bad idea (even in schools). You stop side conversations in meetings, which is a terribly useful way to ask and reply to questions and share information like URLs with participants. You stop group chats, which are a great way to resolve issues before bringing them to a wider audience (in a Teams channel, for instance). You stop federated communications with Skype consumer users and Teams users in other Office 365 tenants. None of this is good.

Cutting Chat out of Teams is a great way to force people to use apps like WhatsApp instead. That’s a great strategy to follow from a compliance viewpoint because no one will have any idea of the communications passing between employees. Do everyone a favor and leave well alone.

When someone comes to you with weird and wonderful ideas about Office 365 administration, consult the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to see what we think. Sometimes we might even have an answer!