Forum Discussion
Teams messages search function does not show full conversation
Jason Drew I had the same issue and managed to find a workaround. Not the best but it does the trick and only need to setup once and won't have to do it again.
Setup:
- First you need to have power automate installed in your MS Teams (You can install from the apps store)
- Open power automate app in teams and go to the create tab, search for template "follow up on a message" and click on it to start the setup.
- click edit in advanced mode
- In the delay step change the unit from minutes to seconds and save (you will see why later)
Search:
- Now search for the message you want as usual
- hover over the message in question, you will see bunch of emojis and three dots.
- click on the three dots, click more actions from the submenu and then choose the flow you created "Follow up on a message"
- once you click the flow you will be prompted to enter a reminder time, choose 20 minutes an submit (we changed the minutes to seconds in the setup step, so it will remind in 20 seconds not 20 minutes)
- after the 20 seconds have passed, you will receive a reminder with a link to view the message. once you click the link it will take you to the original thread you wanted.
ps. you could go into the power automate app to edit the flow adaptive card (first step) to show different values and reminder options if you want. i.e. remine after 1 second instead of 20
Good luck
ashhashtaka Thanks for sharing, that's a really creative workaround. I think the success of clicking on "View Message" from the reminder might be dependent on how recent the chat is, or perhaps the size of the data required to search. The process worked perfectly to navigate back to a 2019 convo I had with a co-worker who I rarely chat with... but it freezes up Teams entirely when I try to do the same thing for a co-worker that I chat with daily (I just get that purple circle that endlessly spins, until Teams becomes unresponsive and I have to force it closed). Curious to hear if it works for others.
- Hi Karen, thanks for the complement. And yes, I had the same problem when I looked for a 1 year old message, I left it for a couple of minutes with the loading circle and went and did some other work and it eventually loaded the thread.
I believe the problem here is exactly the same reason the native search doesn't show the full thread which is 'MS Teams doesn't have those message locally in the cache %appdata%\Microsoft\teams' and have to download it all from MS servers on demand. Same happen if you try to scroll back in a chat, it load bit by bit which is a nightmare if you are trying to scroll back a year in a busy chat.
Defiantly not the best solution, but its worth it if you are looking for something important until MS address the issue.