Access to Recurring Meetings Chat in Microsoft Teams

Did you know the chat for recurring Microsoft Teams meetings can be viewed by anyone who has ever attended the meeting, forever?  

During orientation at Regroove, we invite newbies to sit in on lots of Microsoft Teams meetings, even ones they may never attend again. We invite them to these meetings, even if they aren’t relevant to their position, so everyone on the team gets a general idea of how our business operates. Many of these meetings are recurring, so the newbies will only be invited to one occurrence of the meeting.  

The unexpected feature comes into play here. If you only invite someone to one iteration of a recurring Microsoft Teams meeting, they will have access to the meeting chat in perpetuity.

It’s easy to assume that if a person isn’t invited to future iterations of a recurring meeting, they won’t have access to the meeting chat moving forward. This is not the case, however, and this resulted in one of our new team members being able to read new messages months after her orientation.

So, if you’re going to invite someone to only one iteration of a meeting, you’ll also want to make sure you remove them from the chat afterwards.

Here’s how to remove someone from the recurring meeting chat in Microsoft Teams:

• Enter the meeting chat;
• Click on the Participants icon next to the ‘Join’ button, then click the ‘X’ next to the person you want to remove;
  

• Click ‘Remove’ in the confirmation popup.

This Microsoft Teams tip will ensure that those coworkers that infrequently attend Microsoft Teams meeting cannot see the Microsoft Teams chat in meetings they don’t attend.