Office365 Disable Office Online Chat in document collaboration

[MicrodigitUK]

Is there a way to disable the Office Online Chat function in document collaboration on Word online, Onenote online, etc..? Although I can see the benefits of this in business it's really becoming an issue to manage in the classroom.

 

From what I've read it runs through Skype for business, however our students do not have a licence assigned for Skype but are still able to access office online chat in document collaboration.

 

Reasons why we want to disable it:

We have shared class notebooks setup enabling classes of 30+ students free range to chat to each other. As you can imagine teachers are finding this hard to manage, especially when they're doing it inside of a program that work is also taking place in; making it incredibly easy for the sneaky students to hide their off topic discussions!

 

What makes it worse is that the chats are not saved anywhere - this really does open up a host of child protection issues where cyber bullying could take place within the school without any logs of it ever happening.

 

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!

[LukeRowberry]

Did you get anywhere with this?

[MicrodigitUK]

No I'm afraid not. Can't see any way to stop it at the moment. I'm hoping there might be some PowerShell to disable it.

[eejit]

Has anyone got anywhere with this problem?

[MicrodigitUK]

Has anyone got anywhere with this problem?

 

Sorry never came back to update the thread. Basically there is an unsupported workaround.

 

If you take a SharePoint URL to a file and append to it "&dchat=1"　then that session will not have Doc Chat. The owner of the file can copy the URL, edit it, and then send that out.

 

Here's an example:

https://msft.spoppe.com/teams/wac/_layouts/15/WopiFrame.aspx?sourcedoc=%7Bedd18b12-d702-4c08-b6f6-2704232d8cdb%7D&action=default&dchat=1

 

NOTE: this appending doesn't work with generated Share links so it's important that the participants already have access to the file prior to clicking the link.

 

 

Also my colleague also started a SharePoint Uservoice vote for the ability to disable the feature here:

 

https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/16300306-ability-for-administrators-to-disable-office-online

 

If anyone else has is having the same issues with online chat could you please vote

[eejit]

Awesome thanks - in the meantime I'd logged a support call with Microsoft and they came back with:

 

"Hi there! Currently I am informed that there is no way to disable this feature. I am going to talk to the NEXT team and see if there are any current updates regarding this. Please bare with me as I am looking for an updates current answer to this."

 

The more pressure that is put on them the better, so I've just added my 3 votes to the uservoice link.