Has there been issues with Outlook email and Teams messaging? I cant compose Teams chat for students at present. And also with Outlook, when I try to search staff emails by staff name, no results. Any thoughts?

Dear @Nigel Quinn,

Good day! Welcome to Q&A forum! 

To understand the situation better and provide you with the most suitable support, could you confirm the following information: 

For the issue with Teams: 

• How long has the issue been going on? Have others in the same organization with you reported similar issues? 
• Are you able to chat with staff or educators, or is it only students affected? 
• Are you using the desktop app, web version, or mobile app of Teams? Is the issue consistent throughout all the Teams platforms? 
• Has your institution recently changed chat supervision policies? 
• Are students seeing any error messages when trying to chat? 

For the issue with Outlook: 

• Are you using Classic Outlook or New Outlook? Are you experiencing the issue on Outlook desktop app, web app (Outlook on the web), or mobile? 
• Is the issue only with searching by staff name, or does it affect other search terms too? 
• Have you recently updated Outlook or your operating system? 
• Are other users experiencing similar search issues? 

Your confirmation would be very helpful!

In the meantime, kindly try the following suggestions to check what might have caused the issue: 

For Teams chat issue: 

• Update Teams to the latest version 
• Try posting in a channel and using @mention to reach students 
• Clear Teams cache: Please refer to this article for step-by-step instructions: Clear the Teams client cache - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn 
• Based on this article: Why can't I use chat in Microsoft Teams? (students) - Microsoft Support, please kindly reach out to the IT Admin to check if there are any changes that could cause the issue, for example: 
  • Supervised chat is enabled 
  • Private chat is disabled for students 
  • An article that the IT Admin could find helpful: Resolve Communication Issues in Information Barriers - Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

 For Outlook search issue: 

• Try searching for the full emails of the staff instead of their names to see if there are any results 
• Run Outlook search troubleshooter: Please refer to this article for step-by-step instructions: Troubleshooting Outlook search issues - Microsoft Support 
• Update Outlook 
• If the issue persists, Repair or Reset Outlook   
  • Go to Windows Settings > Apps > Installed Apps > Outlook 
  • Click Advanced options > Repair 
  • If that doesn’t work, choose Reset (you’ll need to sign in again)
  • 

Kindly let me know when there are updates or if you need further assistance. Any updates you’re able to share would be really helpful. I appreciate your time and look forward to hearing how things are going!  

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