Hi @James660,
unfortunately, it is not possible to do what are you asking for:
When an employee is terminated and their account is deleted from Office 365, their conversation history in Microsoft Teams is handled as follows:
Channel Conversations: The user’s chat messages remain visible in the team channel. The user’s name is replaced with “Unknown User”, but the content of the messages is preserved.
Private 1:1 Chats: The conversation history is still visible. However, on the left side, “Unknown User” is displayed instead of the terminated user’s name.
Team Membership: The terminated user is no longer displayed as a member of the team. If the user is restored within 30 days, their membership to the team will be automatically added back.
In conclusion, when a user is deleted from Office 365, the content they generated, such as chat conversations, remains in the team’s channel and in private chats.
Microsoft Teams: What happens to a terminated employee and their conversation history? | Microsoft L...
You might consider implementing a policy where user accounts are not immediately deleted from AD when someone leaves the company. Instead, you could disable the accounts for a certain period of time. This would allow you to retain the username in Teams chats and make it easier to search for old messages.
You can also use Microsoft Purview (Compliance) to retrieve the Teams data for a specific user.
Conduct an eDiscovery investigation of content in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn
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