Organize chats

I agree with everyone in this post. The lack of ability to organize chat conversations outside of pinned/unpinned is very frustrating.

I work for an enterprise organization, and I chat with multiple stakeholders throughout the day on a 1:1 basis as well as 1:many. I create chat sessions, as well as other members of my company who create chats based on a specific need and it's complex to stay organized.

Here's why I think the ability to organize and group chat sessions is important:

We often start a group chat and discuss objectives with a bigger group (10+) of people,

Then we create several smaller chats with a subset of people from the larger chat that will actually be doing the work.

We break out chats even more granularly because some colleagues are responsible for a specific outcome, while others are responsible for a different outcome and it doesn't make sense to flood everyone's chat screen with messages not relevant to them...

To make a long story short, the need to organize several chat conversations for an initiative is a basic function with most other chat tools, no idea why Teams has struggled with this for years. Get ahold of yourselves Microsoft and fix this issue...

*frustrated*

I think old Teams and Skype both did exactly that. Allow you to group chats to your preferences in your window so to arrange the chats with people who happen to be in the engineering team under a section head called "engineering". THen when you want to see if an engineering cat is online, you don't have to remember or learn all their names and find them alphabetically.... miss that too in new Teams. Channels requires everyone to opt in to that channel you created, plus any other channels someone else may have created. Organization and features at the user's side have diminished. I used to also be able to select size of font and window for my viewing space, besides grouping my chats as I saw fit for MY efficiency. I was just getting nostalgic and googled if this feature is hidden or what...and I see its no longer available.

I came seeking the same and may have come across a possible solution for us.

1. Add the "People" app to your MS Teams.
2. There, you can add Contacts and assign a "Category" to them; the Categories will appear by default to the menu on the left.
3. Then, you can select a Category and it will filter the contact list to show only those members assigned that selected Category.
4. Then, you can select the option to "Chat" with that individual member.

For example, assigning Category "AR" to five individual Contact entries because they are on the "AR" team. Select the "AR" category, and you will see only those five individuals in your Contact List. Selecting the "Chat" icon from the Contact entry opens a chat window including the any history of chat with that person, just like in the regular "Chat" app.

Someone mentioned that you could color code chats, but I am not seeing that functionality.

It seems like a heavily requested function to be able to organize chats. I hope Microsoft jumps on it. Whenever there is a function lacking, I feel like everyone here is drawn back to Google or email correspondence.

Hi Bogden,

Unfortunately, there isn’t a built-in feature to categorize or group chats together based on specific criteria (such as by topic or sender group) within Teams.

However, you can create separate group chats for different purposes and name them accordingly. For instance, you could have a “Project A” group chat, a “Marketing Team” group chat, and so on.

Remember that group chats are distinct from channels, which are used for broader team communication within a specific context

I am presuming that channels would not work for you in this scenario.

Let me kow if you need any further assistance.

Regards

Kevin