Manage meeting chat for Microsoft Teams town halls

APPLIES TO: Meetings Webinars Town halls

In Microsoft Teams town halls, only presenters, organizers, and co-organizers can use chat to communicate with each other. Organizers can turn on Meeting chat in their Meeting options to allow attendees to a chat and interact with each other. Meeting chat is only available during the town hall. Organizers, presenters, and co-organizers can still chat separately in the Event group chat.

As an admin, you can manage whether town hall organizers can turn on meeting chat for their attendees.

For details on how your users use meeting chat for town halls, see Chat in a town hall in Microsoft Teams.

Manage meeting chat for your organizers

To manage whether town hall organizers can turn on meeting chat for their attendees, use the -TownhallChatExperience parameter within the PowerShell CsTeamsEventsPolicy cmdlet.

The following table shows the behaviors of the settings for the -TownhallChatExperience parameter:

Turn off meeting chat

To turn off meeting chat, use the following script:

Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy -Identity <policy name> -TownhallChatExperience None

Turn on meeting chat

To turn on meeting chat, use the following script:

Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy -Identity <policy name> -TownhallChatExperience Optimized

Event chat eDiscovery and storage

Messages for meeting chat in town halls are only stored in the organizer's mailbox for up to 30 days. During this time, if you do a content search for the organizer, you can see all the messages that were sent in that meeting chat. However, if you place the organizer’s mailbox on legal hold, the mailbox continues to keep the meeting chat messages for longer.

When the organizer leaves the company anytime from when the event is scheduled to 30 days after the town hall ends, the following details apply:

• Event chat might be unavailable during the town hall.
• Chat might be available during the event, but might not get sent to the organizer’s mailbox.
• Some messages aren't e-Discoverable in the organizer’s mailbox depending on when the organizer leaves the company.

If a town hall organizer leaves the company, you should reschedule the town hall.

You can't see which users viewed specific messages during the event. You also can't search for meeting chat messages in an attendee's mailbox.

Learn more, see Get started with Content search.

Limitations

• If a town hall restarts, meeting chat isn't available in the new town hall.
• Attendees can only send up to 200 characters of text and emojis into the Event Chat.
• All other message composition options that are available in a Teams Meeting chat like sending pictures, sending GIFs, attaching files, or formatting text aren't supported. Hyperlinks are only supported if they're fewer than 200 characters.
• Attendees can't use @ to mention others, reply to other chat messages using the 'Reply' function, or 'React' to messages.
• Town hall chat is only available for attendees, presenters, and organizers during the town hall. Town hall chat isn't available before or after the town hall.
• During the town hall, attendees can only see the last 200 messages.
• Attendees sending chat messages might experience a 15-30 second latency from the presenters and organizers.
• Town hall chat isn't supported for town halls with more than 20,000 attendees.
• Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows with a Pro license can't use chat when they join town halls as a presenter.

To view the list of platforms that support this feature, see Platform support for Teams events features.

Related articles

• Plan for town halls
• Manage meetings chat
• Attendance report for meetings and webinars in Microsoft Teams
• Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy