Following on from last month’s tips for organising Teams and Channels within Microsoft Teams, this month we take a look at some of the features relating to Teams messages.
- Quickly find conversations that you’re a member of or messages that you’re tagged in. To do this, click the Activity icon at the top of the left sidebar. This opens the Feed pane to the right. To the right of the Feed pane title bar, right-click the Filter icon (three horizontal lines in a funnel shape) and select @ Mentions from the menu that opens. Conversations that you’re a member of, and messages that you’re tagged in, will be listed in the Feed pane.
- Save specific messages. This can be handy if you want to compile a list of messages to refer to later. Go to the top right of a message that you want to save, click the three-dot (More options) icon, and click Save this message. To view a list of saved messages, click your profile headshot or icon at the upper right of the Teams app and click Saved from the menu that opens. The messages that you saved will appear in the Saved pane toward the left side of the Teams app.
- Make sure the right people see your messages. It can be easy to overlook a message if you’re working in multiple Channels, each containing lots of messages. To make sure a specific person in your team sees a particular message, tag them as you write your message by typing @ followed by their user name. Once you post the message, the person will get a notification as a prompt to read it and respond to it.
- Title your conversations. To help a conversation thread stand out among the other conversations in a Channel, you can give it a title. As well as raising its profile, this also helps if you need to find the conversation later, as you can enter the title into the search box of the Teams desktop app.To add a title as you’re composing a new conversation, click the Format icon (an “A” with a pencil) at the left end of the toolbar below the text entry field. The message composing window will expand up, which includes a line that says “Add a subject.”
- Mark a message as important. Another way to draw attention to a message in a channel conversation is to mark it as important. Once you post it, Teams will immediately alert the other people in the chat to read your message. They will be reminded to do so every two minutes for 20 minutes – so you should only use this function for a truly urgent matter! To mark a message important, click the Format icon. The message composing window will expand up. At the right end of the text formatting toolbar, click the three-dot (More options) icon, then select Mark as important.
- Pin a message. A message can be pinned to the top of the chat window, bringing it to the attention of others in the chat. To achieve this, hover over the message that you want to pin, so that the emoticons toolbar appears. Click the three-dot icon and select Pin on the small menu that opens.
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