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Lefty's avatar
Lefty
Copper Contributor
Jan 29, 2025

Can I remove/hide a user from Teams?

Is it possible to "disconnect" a user account (Business Standard license, so teams is included) from Teams, so it cannot send or receive chats, or join or be invited to teams?

By way of explanation, I am dealing with a situation where a number of users had two accounts on the same tenant for "reasons" (happened before I got involved). I have merged (using BitTitan) the emails, contacts and calendars from the unwanted accounts into the users' primary accounts, but was intending to not delete the secondary accounts straight away for the sake of user confidence. So I changed the primary address of those accounts to a spare domain that was already set up in the tenant but they decided not to use (so the mailbox user(at)olddomain.com became user(at)sparedomain.com) and then aliased the user(at)olddomain.com email address to the primary account of user(at)newdomain.com

My theory was that this would then mean that all emails would go to the primary account (since the spare domain has never been used in any communications before) but the users could still check their old mailboxes and calendars to reassure themselves they had everything before I removed the accounts completely.

I didn't count on 365 "helping out" in the background.

Where users were seeing "user(at)olddomain.com" in their Team app, they STILL see that, but confusingly behind the scenes, rather than those messages going to the same account an email sent there would, they go to the account that address was PREVIOUSLY allocated to, namely the user(at)sparedomain.com account which is supposed to be dormant.

I can only assume that the routing has been automatically switched by 365 when I did the primary email juggling, but the client has not updated the display text. 

Anyway, I need to stop people from messaging those old accounts, but old habits die hard. I'd prefer to keep the accounts available (purely for viewing purposes) for a short while so users can reassure themselves (and me) that they have everything they need from them, hence the initial question.

  • Remove the Teams license from the user (or the Business Standard one), and if the account is not used actively, disable it. Either of these actions should result in "deprovisioning" the account from Teams.

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