By default, in Microsoft Teams, you have the ability to delete your own messages but not other people’s. That’s a good thing unless you are an administrator or owner of the Team. There are plenty of cases where a chat message from another member of the Team could be considered inappropriate and needs to be removed by an administrator. Problem is that, generally, even an administrator cannot delete another person’s chat message.

This behaviour can be changed in the Teams administration portal by making changes to the appropriate Messaging policy.

You’ll firstly need to navigate to the Teams administration center which you can access via the Microsoft 365 admin center. You can also get there directly by navigating to:

https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/

You then need to select Messaging policies from the items on the left as shown above.

Then, on the right, you will see the option to Manage policies, which you should select.

Most tenants should only have a single policy as shown above, but if not you’ll need to select the appropriate policy you wish to change. Simply click on the policy name you wish to change. Here, I’ve selected the only one available Global (Org-wide default).

Ensure the option Owners can delete sent messages is set on On as shown above.

You’ll now need to wait for that policy to be updated to your Team. It will take a little while so don’t expect the changes to be seen immediately. Not that I have tried to see whether using PowerShell to force the changes works any quick but if you find it does, let me know. The command you want if you plan to user PowerShell to make this change is:

set-csteamsmessagingpolicy –allowownerdeletemessage $true

Once the changes in the policy have been pushed out to the Team, any owner of that Team will now be able to delete any chat message from any user as simply as they can their own messages.

This ability will hopefully make life a little easier for Team owners who need to ensure compliance and appropriate behaviour in their Teams.