Show context around old Teams messages from search results

Anonymous
2020-09-29T18:45:59+00:00

Looking for help with a particular issue with searching for older messages inside of Teams.

When I search for a certain keyword - say, "hot dog" - I get results that are both old and recent from past conversations. If I look at the recent results I get the full message context that surrounds it - messages coming and going.

If I read older messages, however, I only get the single message result without any surrounding context. This is only marginally helpful, as the context is necessary to add, well, context to the conversation!

Has anyone figured out how to do this? Is it an admin side thing that needs to change?

Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams for business | Chats | Search messages and conversations

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-05-13T13:46:29+00:00

    As currently implemented, it makes Teams almost worthless as a business communication and archival tool.  You do not realize what you are missing with search until you need it for referral to a decision previously made, only to find out search does not work as you would expect in modern software.  At that point you realize that the discussion with your colleagues should have occurred over email.  Then you would have been able to have access to it, review everyone's viewpoints, and remind yourself of the decisions made. 

    Maybe Teams should be remarketed as MS Instant Messager -- great for discussions this instant (like what do you want for lunch or how about them Cowboys last night), but don't expect it to be an archival of your Teams' decision history.

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-04-10T10:36:10+00:00

    I have 2 similar huge chats. That is why I let that "press PgUp"-tool just run. For one chat this was done over night. For the other I needed to let it run over a weekend.

    I know that this is just a very bad workaround. But it solved my problem and in the end this is all that matters. Let's hope that someone finds a better method.

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  3. Anonymous
    2021-04-09T17:46:24+00:00

    This would take days in some of my chat history. If I want to see something that I talked to one of my teammates about (who i talk to basically all day) 6 months ago i would be scrolling through and loading tens of thousands of messages.

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  4. Anonymous
    2021-04-09T17:30:41+00:00

    I figured that would make it work.. and if that doesn't show this has nothing to do with "feasibility" and a lot to do with bad design I don't know what does.   I don't see why they would clear out the chat history/cache after logging out and give you no control over that behavior.  If the data is encrypted this shouldn't be an issue.

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  5. Anonymous
    2021-04-09T09:09:33+00:00

    What solved this issue for me was to scroll back in every single chat from "now" to the beginning. To simplify this I used a little tool made with AutoIt that repeatedly sends the PgUp-key. In some chats it still takes like forever. However, once this is done the search keeps on showing the context. But if by whatever reason you log out of Teams you have to do this again once you log back in.

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