You can now disable chat during Microsoft Teams meetings

What you need to know

• With Microsoft Teams, you can now disable chat during meetings.
• Chat can be turned on or off on a per-meeting basis.
• You can also set it up so that participants can chat only during the meeting.

Thousands of people asked for Microsoft Teams to have the ability to disable chats within meetings. Microsoft has responded and rolled out the feature to Teams. Now people can enable or disable chat per meeting. A Microsoft engineer explains the feature in a Teams feedback forum.

“Allow the meeting organizer to temporarily disable chat during a meeting,” the original feedback asked. Adding: “We often have people who are so focused on the chat that they don’t pay attention to the actual meeting. We would like to be able to turn the chat off at the beginning of the meeting and then turn it back on at an appropriate point.”

A Microsoft technician confirmed that the feature is now available and shared a link to a Microsoft support page.

The page explains that there are three options for chat during meetings:

Enabled (default): Participants can chat before, during, and after the meeting.

Disabled: No one, including the organizer, can send chat messages.

During the meeting only: Participants can chat during the meeting. The organizer can send messages at any time.

Use the option next to Allow meeting chat to switch between these settings.

Source: windows central