Forum Discussion
Is it possible to disable the Files tab from the Chat Window in Teams
kensleylewis I don't think this is a good idea, people will just email files to each other and you'll lose the benefit. You are unlikely to have a team or channel for every interaction that happens in your business, there's always adhoc things that sit outside this structure.
Chats, even group chats are clearly perceived by users as fairly temporary structures, teams are longer lived, I've never seen it come up that information is lost in group chats. To be honest I don't really see very many real group chats at all, that happens in the teams.
In simple terms I think the answer would be to prevent them sharing files in OneDrive, then the feature in Teams will not work. There is no specific control to disable sharing in chat, you can turn it off entirely in a Messaging Policy.
PEGGYATA Hi there, well I tend to disagree. You're not sharing multiple copies of files in all these places, you're using links to those files which live in SharePoint Online libraries and OneDrive. There's been plenty progress when it comes to file sharing in Teams and SharePoint/OneDrive for the file sharing and collaboration experience to be consistent.
These are the prompts.
From chats
From channel conversations
This is now the default file sharing prompt introduced all over in M365 where you're sharing links.
And when working on these files coming from a link you have the co-authoring feature instead of previous "check out" behavior which locked the file for others.
You should also make sure not all users can create groups, i.e. Teams using the AAD Directory settings. And when it comes to channel creation at least limit that to the team owner/owners.
And I haven't even mentioned the compliance features in Teams here as those are for controlling access and data loss etc.
- Thank you, yes I am aware of the co-authoring and the files not being duplicated. I am observing users however, commenting on the confusion arising from Teams files. They don't think about the back end or who can see it. They just post. It is sort of going against the grain of Teams to restrict how people use it. I am hoping MSFT starts fixing some of the missing features that would help shape it better.
- Teams cross-tenant chats do not allow Files, so here's what I am going to try: Create a new Office 365 tenant with one user, and provision with the least expensive sku that supports Teams. Then, in my real tenant, invite that dummy user from the other tenant to any chat where I want to block files.
PEGGYATA I hear you, anyone with a background in Knowledge Management and Information Architecture would see the issues with allowing unmanaged content to accumulate. However we lost already, users want immediate self-service teams, just to drop a file in chat, random sharing from OneDrives etc. In the past I surveyed users, they are clearly more satisfied with an open, uncontrolled service. My role was always to improve user satisfaction, to allow them to be happy like a pig in document mud.
Only in very specific industries documents have sufficient value that organisation beats immediacy, so unless you are engineering a plane, nuclear reactor, law firm etc. then it's simply not worth resisting unstructured collaboration.
- Immediacy is a great quality...but mud is not something I would want for my shared files.
