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
    2020-09-30T04:37:32+00:00

    Hi Andygoes,

    Thanks for your post in our forum. When searching for an old message in Teams, we can only click to check the details about this specific chat message, but unfortunately, it is not feasible to show the chat history related to the specific search result. 

    I can understand to have the ability to see related chat history will be more convenience when searching in Teams. To help us continuously improve your experience with our products, we will be very grateful if you could submit your feedback and feature request in the Teams UserVoice forum.

    We appreciate your valuable comments. Thanks for your time and efforts.

    Best regards,

    Jennifer

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-10-01T19:38:10+00:00

    Without context on older messages, search is basically useless. 

    Example: I know I asked a coworker for the ip address of an application they were building 3 months ago so I do a search for "Application X"

    The result i get back is me asking "what is the ip address of application X" and thats it. I can't view his answer to my question. 

    I could theoretically scroll up through 3 months worth of chat history to see the message (which would take me an hour) so it's not like its not there. 

    Again, without surrounding context, searches older than 90 days old are completely broken and pointless. At least with S4B all conversations could be saved as conversation history in outlook but now that functionality is gone as well.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-10-09T13:45:16+00:00

    @microsoft, this needs to be fixed.  As stated by @jlaprade, searching chat history without showing the surrounding messages is completely useless.

    Dropping these User voice threads in case anyone comes across this response and wants to add their vote to push it up the list of features:

    https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/30971131-search-results-go-to-the-chat-link-should-take-y

    https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/38340526-make-search-return-messages-in-context-of-the-conv

    https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/41302879-show-context-around-search-results-such-as-adjacen

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-10-29T22:39:45+00:00

    The search is basically useless without context.  Provide the ability to show messages around that +/- a days.  It has the timestamp on the message already.

    Either that or provide the ability to search around message between 2 dates...

    I find it surprising how many very basic features many Microsoft products are lacking.  Not sure what your PMs are doing over there.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-11-18T15:44:34+00:00

    I found a workaround..  Have someone that is in the same chat group search the term you're looking for and like it.  This gives you an activity notification and if you click the activity it brings you to the message with the previous and ensuing messages in context.  It took a bit to load, but I was able to find the answer, and not just the question, to what I was looking for.  

    That being said, Microsoft should fix this so you can search beyond 90 days and see the message within the context as well.  Seems pretty basic.

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