Forum Discussion
SW-SoCo2
Nov 15, 2024Brass Contributor
Disabling Outlook "Reactions" for a group of users
I've been asked for a solution to disable "Reactions" in Outlook for specific group of users, so looking to find out if there's any new information.
There are multiple articles from roughly a year ago about creating a transport rule to add a specific message header - but not much else.
Does anyone have any new information or references regarding disabling Outlook 'Reactions' for either specific group(s) of users; or even tenant-wide?
- SW-SoCo2Brass Contributor
Yep - exactly what we found in testing :-(
Super-clumsy way to try and mitigate the "Emoji Reaction" behavior if it's anything OTHER than tenant-wide [scoping the transport rule to a specific group requires a mail-enabled group for scoping... since it's an email transport rule - ugh].
Plus - in our own testing there were all kinds of scenarios where the end-user experience wasn't as expected. The two things we looked for:
(1) the smiley-face 'emoji reaction' button to be greyed out
(2) when hovering over the button a popup "Reactions are disallowed..." would appear
(1) & (2) were only consistent with either OWA or New Outlook - just about every other Outlook use we have (i.e. Outlook for iPhone/Android; Outlook in AVD; Outlook on Mac; etc.) didn't see this - from the end-user perspective, it appeared that they could post an 'emoji reaction.'
The transport rule seemed to take precedence - and the emoji reaction ultimately didn't work, only as evidenced by the fact that the reaction didn't appear for either the message sender or other recipients.
End result: we quickly ditched the idea [and transport rule] entirely --- will wait to see if a better option becomes available down the road.
- Sonai91Copper Contributor
Check the configuration steps to disable reactions in Outlook from the link: https://office365itpros.com/2023/09/19/outlook-reactions-disable/.
Nothing new in this space, afaik. You can scope the transport rule to a set of users or the entire tenant, as needed.