Auto hide previous conversation

Copper Contributor

We've just been force "upgraded" to teams from Skype for business and I am trying to find a way to auto hide previous conversations. I use IM quite a bit but I also quite frequently present information on my screen to other people in a relatively informal manner. Sometimes it's useful to be able to send someone a quick message in the middle of some of these sessions or when working together with someone at my desk. I'm quite conscious of the fact that potential confidential conversations could be easily seen in any of these situations because previous chat history is shown by default and also slight summaries shown under all pinned and recent contacts in the chat list.

In Skype, when opening the application, by default, none of this was seen. If you wanted to see the previous conversations, you could click history. Otherwise new chats would be opened without any prior discussions. 

How can I hide this information by default so that the whole office can't see my previous discussions when I need to send someone a message mid-meeting?

4 Replies
If you use multiple monitors, you could run the Teams app on one, but share your desktop on the other.

Alternatively, just share a specific app, rather than your desktop.

@Rob Ellis, thanks for the reply but this doesn't really work for me. Normally the situation is that I have taken the laptop to a meeting room and I'm duplicating the single screen with a TV and/or remote

session. 

Sort Answer is you can't.

Long answer for work around is, you can hide all your chats, which I know is annoying, but next time you chat with them your history will still pop back in.

Another way to send quick message while presenting etc. Use @username [message] in the command bar at the top, this will send a quick chat to someone without having to leave your screen. And you can respond to a banner toast in the toast itself. Yeah not ideal, but it's all you have for now.

Thanks for the tip about the quick message, this might help a bit....although you still have to open up teams and expose the current conversation to get to that point anyway, still risking the last contacts potential confidential conversation.

This seems like a massive security/personal information flaw to not provide any way of keeping this information hidden. 

Why are we being forced to upgrade to something that has loads of extra functionality that was never necessary and is missing key bits of functionality that worked perfectly fine before?