Microsoft has announced that its Teams collaboration service will finally be adding support for deleting private chat conversations. Twitter user Just Tammy spotted a thread on the Microsoft Teams UserVoice page where the company confirmed that it is planning to implement this feature and an update would be coming soon.
“Thank you for your feedback! The team has finalized the designs for this feature request, and work is planned to begin shortly. We will share an update as soon as one is available,” a Microsoft Teams engineer wrote on the UserVoice forum. Although the software giant has not announced an ETA for this release and the related feature has not been outlined on the Microsoft 365 roadmap, it is expected to arrive as soon as early 2022.
Currently, the app allows users to delete a specific message from a chat and hide, mute, or leave chats, but it is not possible to delete a private chat in Microsoft Teams. By default, the chat, channel, and file data is maintained indefinitely in the app unless the Office 365 Admins chooses to delete the content via retention policies. “Teams supports retention policies for chat and channel messages so that as an admin, you can decide proactively whether to retain this data, delete it, or retain it for a specific period of time and then delete it,” the company explained on its support page.
The ability to delete private chats is a feature that Microsoft Teams users have been requesting for a while now, and it has remained the most-requested feature on the UserVoice forum for around three years. This update should enable employees to protect their private data on shared devices or get rid of old conversations.
