Overview of optional connected experiences in Microsoft Teams

If you have a work or school account, your organization's admin may have provided you with the ability to use one or more cloud-backed services (also referred to as optional connected experiences) while using Microsoft Teams, like GIPHY and/or URL Preview service. These cloud-backed services are optional. Whether you use them is up to you. They're offered to you under terms that differ from the Microsoft Online Service Terms, as described separately for each optional service. This article lists our Teams cloud-backed services.

If your admin has given you the ability to use optional connected experiences in Teams, you can go to Settings > Privacy in Teams and choose whether you want to use optional connected experiences.

Note

If you're an admin, you can give or restrict your users' ability to use optional connected experiences. You can do this by using the Office cloud policy service and configuring the Allow the use of additional optional connected experiences in Office policy setting. This is the same policy setting that controls whether optional connected experiences are available to your users in the Office apps (such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) that come with Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise.

GIPHY

GIPHY is a cloud-backed service that lets you use GIFs in your Teams chats. If you're in Teams > GIF > Search, the search terms are sent to GIPHY. These experiences, if allowed by your admin and after you choose to use them, are subject to the GIPHY Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

This is a menu showing the Giphy selection button and textbox for typing information in to retrieve a Giphy image or images.

URL Preview service

The URL Preview service automatically generates a preview snippet and attaches under the snippet the URL when a user sends a URL string. This service will make a request to the service URL as the user is typing the message.

A screen showing a sample of a URL preview for the Microsoft home page in a text box.