March 1, 2020 – Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure Technical Journal

This sounds like it comes under moderation feature of Teams, but it’s not. If you are trying to configure Teams owners to allow deleting chats sent by other members, you are on the right place. Microsoft Teams has moderation features but this doesn’t falls under that setting.

To configure moderation for Teams, you can refer to my previous article which will walk you through the moderation configuration.

Let’s have a look at this scenario. As you can see below, Neil is a member of the “Project Delivery” team and he sent a few messages in the Linda Scope channel. Let’s think about a situation where some users post inappropriately in a channel and the Team owner would like to take it out immediately (when there is no moderation enabled). At this point, its fair that an owner might need the control to manage this.

By default, owners won’t be able to delete these messages from the channel. As the following screenshot elaborates, Manoj is the Team owner and he has no ability to delete the message.

Here are the owners of this channel (obviously, Manoj is an owner here)

To empower owners of this Team with delete permission, we can simply turn it on from the Message Policy. Login to Office 365 an administrator and head on to “Teams Admin Centre”

Navigate to “Messaging Policies”

By default, there is only one Messaging Policy which is “Global ORG Wide” policy. You can use this policy if you want every Teams owner should be granted (applies to all existing and upcoming Teams) with this privilege.

Note: If you are editing the Default Global policy, it might take a few hours to apply the changes (right now, 24-48 hours)

Just leave it as it is and create a new custom policy if you are looking to grant this for certain owners only.

Give it a meaningful name and a small description to recognize. And ensure the first switch (Owners can delete sent messages) is turned “ON”

Once done, you should be able to see both policies listed down.

Now let’s navigate to “Users” blade and click on the target administrator who you want to grant this privilege and navigate to policies in that profile (remember, you need to repeat this for every owner individually)

Click on the “Edit” link on the right pane and assign the custom policy under ” Messaging Policy” dropdown as shown below.

Give it a few minutes and check the same scenario. Log in as a member and try to post a new message then try to delete that by logging from Owners account (for testing, it is ideal to have two browser profiles and both users logged in side by side so you could monitor the behavior in real time).

As you can see from the following screen shot, Manoj can now delete this Neil’s message as an owner. Which means, the policy has applied to Manoj Successfully.