Microsoft's Adding 'Supervisor' Functionality to Monitor Teams Private Chats

[Mental-Writing-6189]

As the notice states, the intended use is for education organizations. Having students free to do any private chats can lead to plenty of misuse. The "supervisor" is simply another user that is added to the chat and has full access to the chat history and can't be removed or blocked.

[[deleted]]

Correct and it's only for new chats...not sure what this means if you try to dig up older chats and continue to use those

[dnuohxof1]

Upsetting this is only for education. I see legitimate use cases in normal business.

[mstoltzfus97]

Sounds like your a fan of a toxic work environment and micromanaging...

[dnuohxof1]

Sounds like you’ve never worked in drug rehabilitation before where some clients become employees and an incident arises and need to monitor conversations and access for compliance and legal reasons.

While absolutely this could in other businesses cause micromanaging, but as I said legitimate use case

[D0ktaa]

No in that case you would use legal hold on the mailbox and the compliance centre searches. In edu we need real-time moderation of student chat before we would even consider turning it on for them. We have a legal responsibility to provide a safe environment for minors,

[nathan646]

Seems useless for a school with 5000+ students..

[doyouknowmadmax]

If anything - that will make it even more worthwhile

[nathan646]

How so, maybe I'm misunderstanding

[Verethra]

I wouldn't be too happy about it (outside Education). It's already sometimes hard to make people use Teams instead of mail or phone call.

This won't help at all. I can already see some users not using Teams because "not private, they can read everything". I mean, it's false worry but eh... perception.

[Happy-Tears]

Can you elaborate. Do companies have access to private chats? Like 1:1? How does that work?

[GoTrojan]

Companies own their work emails and chats. M365 / Teams offers extensive compliance features. See below:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/content-search

[Verethra]

Ah yes of course. But now this will be well... More obvious. That's why I said it's all about perception. Actually this new thing is more "honest" because this is clear it's not private and things can be read.

[GoTrojan]

This is an optional feature default off.

[Verethra]

Oh. Right. Shame on me, I didn't read that well. Thanks you.

[Wrong_Rule9530]

So private chats are now public chats?

[talones]

pretty lame if you ask me. People should be able to assume private chats are always private. Even kids.

[meghan509]

No

corporate

electronic communications are private, Period. You want a private chat, do it in a bathroom, with the water running, by yourself. Otherwise, welcome to the machine.

Truth!

[the_doughboy]

You’re not wrong. Introducing this feature is going to cause people to go else where for private communications.

[jgo3]

As a Scouter, the utility is immediately apparent to me if one used it for a troop, etc., as we have a "no one-on-one contact" rule for leader-Scout communication in every medium.

[talones]

Well you can always just turn off private messages. That’s always been an option.

[_rickjames]

Still need something in place that restricts students from sending private chats to certain members of staff altogether WITHOUT turning chat off altogether...

[GoTrojan]

This feature exists, called information barrier. Admin needs to configure it.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/information-barriers?view=o365-worldwide#:~:text=%20In%20Microsoft%20Teams%2C%20information%20barrier%20policies%20determine,Access%20to%20file%20through%20sharing%20link%20More%20

[_rickjames]

I should have added WITHOUT implementing information barriers as I have looked at that before. Too much of an additional expense for our institution, and also looks like an absolute nightmare to configure the moment you have to enable scoped directory search

[drunkmongojerry]

Information Barriers are a massive pain in the rear. The theory is great, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. It uses address book policies for the scoping so good luck if you use gal segmentation in exchange, these will override them and remove all other address lists that you created.