Disabling Outlook "Reactions" for a group of users

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.