Additional chat-related features and issues within Microsoft Teams for business
How did you navigate to Teams chat / Edit? I'm on my screen of one of my chat. Nowhere I could see the Edit function.
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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:
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:
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.
Additional chat-related features and issues within Microsoft Teams for business
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How did you navigate to Teams chat / Edit? I'm on my screen of one of my chat. Nowhere I could see the Edit function.
im=instant messages
Keyword queries and search conditions for eDiscovery | Microsoft Learn
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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.
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.