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
    2022-09-22T20:41:58+00:00

    I am sorry, but I have to agree with the other commentators: without the ability to see the context around the chat, the search function is USELESS! It is frustrating and I can't believe there isn't a fix for this obvious defect from 2020!

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-09-16T17:39:22+00:00

    Being a software developer myself, I can guarantee that this feature is "feasible". If the Teams software can pin a search result and then retrieve the context when the pin is clicked then we know it can achieve the result in two steps. The software could string those two steps together without interaction from the user. Microsoft's project manager(s) must have decided that this feature improvement is a very low priority item.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-09-16T11:33:15+00:00

    This is the single most dumbest reasoning for not showing context around chat history search ever.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-09-15T22:31:36+00:00

    I thought about the pin trick too, and I almost rejoiced! But then when I clicked on the pin, it just showed "Loading" and it never brought up or went to the message. I watched it spin on "Loading" for 15 minutes before I gave up and figured it's not going to work (and if it takes longer than 15 minutes, then that's useless too). That was in the client, but the web version looks like it's doing the same thing. So now I cannot see important instructions I need, where I assumed I'd be able to find them later using a search, but NOPE!

    I don't get why this should be such an issue. If you can manually scroll back much further than 90 days in a conversation, why wouldn't Microsoft be able to design a search that can more quickly scroll back to that part of your conversation that contains that search term? It shouldn't have to load everything in between, but just go to that date and load the messages around that date. I have a hard time believing this "isn't feasible".

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-09-06T14:18:53+00:00

    It is 2022 and this is still not a thing. Slack can do this, just saying.

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