Let's start with the assumption that we have an Office 365 tenant and that our users have both an Exchange Online mailbox and a provisioned OneDrive for Business. Without these technologies, our users wouldn't be able to have chat messages persisted or share files with each other.
A Teams administrator can turn off many of the Teams services to give you a pretty bare bones chat application. In the Office 365 Admin Center, under Settings > Services and add-ins, you can disable the ability for default and external apps which will limit the extensibility of the tool. From there, it's a matter of setting a few policies in the Teams and Skype Admin Center.
- Messaging Policy (choose to keep the fun on or kill it, but the Chat selector should stay on or we kinda lose the whole point 😁)
- Meeting Policy (All of this stuff will be turned off. In fact, there is an "AllOff" policy that's already created that you can apply instead of the default)
- Live Events Policy (in the same area as meetings, but more stuff to turn off)
- A few other settings in Teams Settings > Files will allow us to hide all other options except for OneDrive for Business.
The result?
In the Teams client (web, desktop, and/or mobile), we should find the following:
- The activity icon stays and will let us know when we've been mentioned, etc.
- The chat icon will remain, but "Meet Now" will be gone. The ability to call someone that you initiate a private chat with remains.
- The Teams icon stays, and will never go away. All users will be able to create a new Team unless the ability to create O365 groups has been altered (Check out the PowerShell here)
- The Meetings icon sticks around but the button to create a new Teams meeting disappears. This essentially becomes a viewer for your Outlook calendar.
- The Files icon will let our users see Recents, Teams files, or a link to their OneDrive