Forum Discussion
Is it possible to disable the Files tab from the Chat Window in Teams
Through Microsoft teams, our plan is to encourage our staff teams to go to their Teams location or Channel locations to manage their files. We do not want them to unintentionally associate group chat...
I can vouch that the simplicity of posting files in teams chat by dozens or hundreds of users that have little experience building collaboration environments and those same users building up file volumes in Teams channel file tabs is a growing monster. Users are abandoning the use of sharepoint pages altogether and we admins sit and watch the garbage pile grow…burying documents and files that are important with it. Now we are stuck fixing a problem created by the tool that doesn’t provide the features to keep it organized, clean, or connected to SP in a usable way. It kind of amazes me anyone could design a structure that is so prone to build up of dozens of old chats and files and duplicates the content hosting features of the foundation back end up, in the new front end. Like a peanut butter and jelly and peanut butter sandwich. Yes the goo starts oozing all over the place. It’s crazy! I don’t know how that design could have launched and no one saw those file tabs would collect immense stale and ill-placed data. And give us no way to manage it or steer users from Teams back into the Sharepoint proper libraries. It’s doesn’t do it. It recreates an imposter again on top. Teams need admin controls and proper hooks to established SP pages in the channel and chat areas instead of these junk file folders.
PEGGYATA I hear you, anyone with a background in Knowledge Management and Information Architecture would see the issues with allowing unmanaged content to accumulate. However we lost already, users want immediate self-service teams, just to drop a file in chat, random sharing from OneDrives etc. In the past I surveyed users, they are clearly more satisfied with an open, uncontrolled service. My role was always to improve user satisfaction, to allow them to be happy like a pig in document mud.
Only in very specific industries documents have sufficient value that organisation beats immediacy, so unless you are engineering a plane, nuclear reactor, law firm etc. then it's simply not worth resisting unstructured collaboration.
- Immediacy is a great quality...but mud is not something I would want for my shared files.
