Disable the chat function between students but allow them to chat with staff

[Hkmh_Ob2]

Hi There everyone,

This is my first ever post on this community. I'm an IT Technician for a school.

I need to be able to disallow groups of students (Years 9 and 10) from chatting with each other while also allow them to chat to Teachers/staff in Teams.

Is there any possible way of doing this from Teams Admin center?

Students are grouped into year levels in AD.

Any suggestions? Or is this even possible? I looked around but can't find the option without having to select each student one by one..

[#2]

Hi, there are so many great things you can do in a school environment. There are policies, a wizard and packages for Teams education.

When it comes to your specific question there are two policies for chats. One in the Meeting policy and another in the Messaging policy. If you disable the latter they will not be able to group chat or do 1:1 but can chat in team channels, and at the same time if you're allowing the former, they will be able to chat during the meeting.

Start at the landing page here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/expand-teams-across-your-org/teams-for-education-lan... and look to the left in the navigation field for all articles.

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

It seems like you are trying to achieve the feature functionality that can be provided by Information barrier. Check if you have the proper licenses you could build the policies for the same.

Information Barrier in Microsoft Teams
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/information-barriers-in-teams

With Regards,
Satish Upadhyaya

[#4]

@Hkmh_Ob2 I am in thr same boat. 

I have been asking for this for 4 years! 

Some students are too young for chat or are irresponsible. We want them to be able to chat with teachers and administrators but not with other students. I don't think this is too complicated to do, please Microsoft help us out and create this function. All current policies do not provide the necessary functionality to do this, believe me I have checked and contacted the support team. It does NOT exist.