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SW-SoCo2's avatar
SW-SoCo2
Brass Contributor
Nov 15, 2024

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-SoCo2's avatar
    SW-SoCo2
    Brass 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.

  • Sonai91's avatar
    Sonai91
    Copper 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.

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