Today, I want to show you how you can disable chat in teams meeting. I will show you how you can do it while a meeting is ongoing and you can also configure it before the meeting even starts. Lastly, show you how you can set it so people can only chat when you are in the meeting. All right.
Today, I’m presenting on employee benefits at the Kevin Cookie Company. If I click on chat, it looks like a few different chat messages have been coming through. It looks like a bunch of people have some questions and some feedback but I want everyone to focus on the deck over here on the left so I think I’m just going to turn off the chat altogether. Now, by default, chat is enabled and while I’m presenting, anyone can come in here to chat.
Disable chat in teams meeting
If I want to change that, I will go up to the top bar and click on more options (…) and see an option for meeting options.
Let’s click on this. It will open up meeting options now and at the very bottom, there is now a new option that says allow meeting chat and currently it’s enabled. This means that anyone can send a message while I’m presenting.
Now, once again, I want everyone to pay attention to all of the great things I have to say. I want it to be more of a one way communication. If I click on this dropdown list, I can disable the meeting chat next. Let’s click on Save.
I have now successfully disabled the meeting chat and if I click back over on chat here, I see a message letting me know that chat has been turned off for this meeting and no one should be able to send any more questions here.
For example, I am now in Nestor’s view, and he has his chat open. He can see my slides, but if he tries to type anything in, he sees this message down here telling him that the chat has been turned off for this meeting.
Now, once I finish going through the whole presentation, it might make sense to turn chat back on. Now, just like I turned it off, I could go back to the same place to turn chat back on here.
I will go to the meeting controls on top and click on the ellipsis again and select meeting options and then go down below where it says allow meeting chat. I can click on this and I can re-enable the chat. Let’s click on Save. Now that I have turned meeting chat back on here.
Within Nestor’s view, he sees a notification letting him know that chat is now re-enabled. Here, Nestor could come down and he could send through a question now, along with being able to disable or enable the meeting chat while a meeting is going on.
You can also set this up ahead of time. Here is my calendar. I see the meeting on employee benefits. I can click into the meeting details and here within the meeting details, up on the top, there’s meeting options. Let’s click on this.
This brings us into the meeting options and here, too, at the very bottom, we see the option to allow meeting chat. My default is set to enable meaning that anyone who joins in is able to chat. Now, I could also set it to disable this way. When people join the meeting, chat will be turned off from the very start. Within this menu, there’s also a third option and it’s called in-meeting only.
What this means is participants are only able to chat if they’re actually in the meeting. Let’s try turning this on to see what type of impact it has here. I will select meeting only and now I will click on Save.
I’m now here within Patti’s view, and I’m looking at the meeting details here. If I go over and click on chat because I said you can only chat within the meeting. Here, you will see that chat is turned off so Patti has to join the meeting before she’s able to chat.
Patti has now joined the meeting and you will see that she’s now able to chat over here because she’s now in the meeting.
Next, I want to show you how you can set it up so people can only chat when you are in the meeting. In my view, let’s go right back up to meeting details and then click on meeting options, back within meeting options. Once again, I can confirm that my attendees can only chat when they’re in the meeting.
But like we just saw with Patti, she was able to join the meeting and then she could start chatting. Now, I want to be in the meeting for anyone to chat with. There is an option that says, who can bypass the lobby? People can’t join the meeting until I let them in. So here, if I select only me, I have to let people into the meeting and once I let them in, they could start chatting.
This effectively gives me complete control over the chat. People can only chat when I am present. I’m now in the meeting and no one else has joined yet here. I can see who is waiting in the lobby since no one else has joined the meeting yet and you can only chat when you’re in the meeting.
No one’s been able to contribute to the chat yet. If I click over on participants here, I could see that both Nestor and Patti are waiting so let me go ahead and admit everyone into this meeting.
Now that both Nestor and Patti are in the meeting, I said they could only type while they are in the meeting here. Now, if I click on the chat, I can see that Nestor said, thanks for letting me in.
Once the meeting’s over, if I no longer want people to be able to chat, let’s say I’m leaving and I don’t want a conversation to continue without me. Right up on the top right hand corner where we have the leave button, I can click on this dropdown and then I could click on end meeting.
This will end the meeting for everyone. Once again, if I have it configured, there’s a lobby and I have to let people in. This effectively means that no one can chat before or after the meeting and I have to be present for all conversations to occur.
To learn about disabling private chat, check the Microsoft website. All right. Well, that’s how you can disable chat in teams meeting.
Now I’d like to hear from you:
Which strategy from today’s guide are you going to try first? Or maybe you have a question about something that I covered.
Either way, I’d like to hear from you. So go ahead and leave a comment below.
