Teams

News, views, and practical insights about topics relating to Microsoft Teams.

Latest Articles

Cleaning Out Old Messages from a Team Channel

A question asked about the best way to remove channel messages from Teams. Microsoft 365 retention policies are an option, but you'll have to wait for retention processing to complete. PowerShell helps because you can create a script to remove all messages and replies from a channel. Everything works, but processing is slow, as we discover when we plunge into the details of writing code.

March 6, 2024

Managing the Discoverability of Private Teams

Microsoft has a new approach to control private team discoverability. You can have all-in access by enabling discoverability through Teams policies or granular access by using sensitivity labels to control if private teams are discoverable or not. This article explains how both methods work.

March 4, 2024

Building a Teams External Access Allow List from External Chats

A Teams external access whitelist controls the domains that users can connect to for federated chats. Organizations often limit federation using a whitelist to reduce the possibility of attacks through chat communications. This article explains how administrators can discover the set of domains users chat with by analyzing chat information using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

November 7, 2023

Teams 2.1 Client Hits General Availability

On October 5, 2023, Microsoft announced the general availability of the new Teams 2.1 client. Based on a new architecture and promising better performance and lower system resource usage, Teams 2.1 is available for Windows and macOS desktops and browsers. The signs are good as the client has been in public preview since March, but we'll only really know how successful the client is after several months of use.

October 5, 2023

Using an Azure Automation Runbook to Remove Teams Chat Threads

A previous article explains how to delete Teams chats using an interactive Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK session. This article builds on that information and explains how to use an Azure Automation runbook to find and remove specified chat threads by scanning all user accounts. The results of the scan and any removed chat threads are emailed to a nominated address at the end of processing.

September 25, 2023

Removing Teams Chat Threads with the Teams Delete Chat API

A beta version of a Graph API to delete Teams chat threads allows administrators to remove unwanted chats. This article reviews how the API requests work to delete, list, and undo deleted chat threads using cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. The first step is to find chats to remove, so we wrote a script to report all the chat threads for the signed-in user.

September 18, 2023