

The announced change isn't a surprise as Microsoft puts more emphasis on their Teams platform to manage the exponential growth.

Microsoft suggests that to prepare for this change, Office 365 customers start using Microsoft Teams chat for real-time collaboration. Get help and support whether you're shopping now or need help with a past purchase. Depending on admin settings, it is possible that some users may continue to see an option to "Join Chat" that will launch a Teams window or Skype, or show that chat is unavailable. Open a service request in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Today, we’re pleased to extend this capability to Office 365 Business and Education customers for documents stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.

Once the co-editor chat feature has been retired, users will continue to see the names of co-editors in the document but the chat function will no longer be available. We recently announced the ability for co-editors to chat with one another directly in a OneDrive document when working in Office Online. With the change, Microsoft recommends that Office 365 customers use Microsoft Teams Chat for real-time collaboration and messaging, or use the document "Comments" feature if you need to attach a comment for a specific section of a document.
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According to a message in the Office 365 Message Center, Microsoft announced today that they will be retiring co-editor chat access inside of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint across all versions of Mac and Windows office, as well as the web starting in mid-April.
