How to export an entire Teams chat history with an individual from a Office 365 work account

Anonymous
2022-08-11T21:40:08+00:00

Hello, I'm hoping to get some information on how to go about exporting Teams chat history from my work Office 365 / Microsoft account.

From what I have found online, it seems that this functionality is available through a web interface, and not available in any form in the desktop app. I am in need of this functionality because the search functionality of Teams leaves much to be desired: if I'm searching for messages to/from a user regarding a particular keyword of interest, Teams may return a single message from over a year ago containing that keyword, but there is no ability to view surrounding context messages nor is there an ability to jump directly to that message in our conversation. I just can't keep justifying scrolling back through months or years of individual conversations to find pertinent messages so I can do my job effectively, so I'm planning on exporting my chat conversations with certain individuals so that I can properly search through them for prior messages.

I've found the following support guide which details steps to follow for exporting Teams data in this manner: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/export-or-delete-your-teams-data-1ed6ac68-5fb4-41be-9861-1a4127fecf68

The following is the section relevant to downloading Microsoft Teams chat conversations:

Export and Delete Your Messages and Media from Chats and Communities

To export your messages and media from chat and community:

  1. Sign in to the Export page with your Microsoft Account.
  2. Select the option to download your Chat history, Media, or both, and then select Submit request. Select Continue when prompted.
  3. You will need to check back periodically to the export page on the status of your export, which you can see at the top of the page under Available Exports. A link to download your files will also appear there when they are available to download.
  4. Select the Download button to download your files.

However, I seem to be running into an issue in regards to the type of account I'm using. I am unable to login with my work account at the provided "export page" link: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2128346

When I attempt to login I receive a message indicating "That Microsoft account doesn't exist. Enter a different account or get a new one."

I am able to login with my work account in-browser at the following address: https://www.office.com/

And from there I can access the Teams web app (whose address is: https://teams.microsoft.com/)

I did attempt to access my account settings from the Teams web app (via Settings > Accounts > Manage) https://myaccount.microsoft.com/https://myaccount.microsoft.com/settingsandprivacy/privacy However, there are no Teams chat export options visible under the privacy settings.

The only data I am able to export is "Microsoft Search History" which includes:

  • Outlook — Your Outlook search history includes your searches in Outlook, Outlook for mobile, and Outlook on the web.
  • SharePoint and Office.com — Your searches in SharePoint Online and Office.com are combined into one history.

Is there any way I can access this export functionality through my work account? Is this something that has to be enabled at a higher admin level by my work's IT department? Or is this something I would need to reach out to them to export for me?

Until Teams' chat functionality allows for jumping directly to a found message in a chat's complete history (with all surrounding messages prior and after being visible) this is the only solution I can think of to effectively search through years of continuous conversations for pertinent information.

Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams for business | Chats | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-06-20T16:07:41+00:00

    It's a bit of a workaround, but it works well. I open Teams in a web browser (Chrome in my case) and then I have a chrome plug-in called FireShot that allows you to select "Capture entire page".

    if you do that when you are in the relevant chat it does a FULL capture including scrolling down and capturing everything off the bottom of the screen, then it allows you to save it either as an image or a PDF file to your PC. I save it as a PDF. The PDF is technically an "image" just saved as a PDF so I then run it through OCR to make it searchable. It only takes about 1 minute to capture an entire chat this way.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-06-19T08:30:37+00:00

    Hi Nick,

    That's really useful info, thank you. Agreed, it's beyond shoddy that this functionality isn't available to the user. I cannot comprehend the thinking behind such a decision.

    I'm not in IT but I am in a position to influence policy and I'll be certainly looking to promote the approach you've suggested. Unfortunately, when you're dealing with things such as Subject Access Requests, it is inevitable that the need to extract Teams messages will arise.

    Thanks again.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-06-18T23:43:14+00:00

    The only solution for me was through a Synology NAS tool/package (Active Backup for Microsoft 365) that came with our storage array. This let me backup a Team, then use a companion portal app to access the sub-channel of a team, select all conversations, and export it all out into a nice HTML file.

    Microsoft's API were a mess, on top of that it sounds like they charge a fee for using it. eDiscovery was a waste of time, apparently you need a E5/M5 license for the Teams data and I could never figure out how to access a Team subchannel for discovery/export.

    If you are in IT, I would strongly go the University of Washington approach and tell your users that Teams should only be used for transitory messaging and never to be used for any compliance purposes given Microsoft has no simple/clean way to export more than a single conversations out of there. If you need to save a conversation for compliance or record keeping, immediately send it to your Outlook and save it that way. Even 24 year old AIM/MSN Messenger could save your conversations automatically, and here we are in 2024 dealing with this duct-taped Teams product that is inferior in every way for chatting.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-05-31T05:23:01+00:00

    agreed. We have been asked to utilize team chat however I now need to document a conversation I had with someone. Additionally I need to retrospectivly same the conversations. the only work around I see is screen shots for the past year. this is going to take forever and it will not be indexed for searching. this is really a mess.

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