Assigning Messaging Policy to a Group

[Alfred_proteko]

I'm in need of clarification behind the functionality of assigning Group Messaging Policies.

I'm responsible for usability improvements (formal job title pending) at an educational institution and I'm looking to migrate our student communication from the LMS we're using into Teams. The reason the faculty have been hesitant about this before is because they're not too keen on the idea of students starting private chats with them to ask a bunch of questions instead of checking the information that's already been posted elsewhere.

So I figured I can create a Messaging Policy that simply disables chat and then assign that to a Group with all the students assigned as members. Only when you create a Group you need to assign an Owner, which means that Messaging Policy would be applied to the Owner as well? Disabling chat for the faculty member assigned as an Owner?

Tl;dr: I want to disable private chat for students, while keeping it enabled for faculty. I don't want to mess around with Information Barriers, and in general I want to keep the solution as simple as possible to manage and maintain for faculty members since the technical proficiency at this institution isn't all that advanced.

Is the solution as simple as creating a dummy user to assign as Group Owner?

[#2]

Depending on your licensing I would use dynamic group membership: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/enterprise-users/groups-create-rule

This way if you utilize a certain field when faculty accounts get created, they will get added to this group and thus assign that group to the policy for chat. This way, no one has to manage it other than whoever creates accounts needs to make sure that "field" you key on gets populated.