Have you noticed that some new Teams messages show up in your activity feed and others do not? The Teams activity feed is meant to highlight Team messages that are important to you. How does Teams know what is important to you? It doesn’t … Teams needs you to tell it what is important to you.

Normally, Teams conversation activity doesn’t appear in your activity feed. When my test account posts a message into the “General” channel …

I see the channel is bolded, indicating new activity; but I do not have any indicators on my Teams or Activity tiles.

What is included in the Activity feed?

Messages to which you’ve replied:  When you reply in a thread, your reply tells Teams that the thread is important to you (just liking a post doesn’t count … you’ve got to actually reply. There are enhancement requests to include some provision for following a thread without replying and muting notifications on a thread to which you’ve replied).

The test account added a new reply after I’d posted my reply. In addition to seeing the channel name in bold, my Activity tile indicates there is one unread message.

Followed Channels: If you want to receive notifications for all threads posted to a channel, follow the channel. Click the ellipsis next to the channel name and select “Follow this channel”.

Now when the test account posts a new thread …

I have an indicator on my Activity tile.

Team At-Mentions: You’ll also see an activity item when the Team is at-mentioned in a post (that’s why at-mentioning the Team is a really effective way to bring attention to your post).

In addition to the activity indicator, I also see an “@” symbol on the Teams tile indicating that a Team has been at-mentioned. And a little number next to the channel that tells you how many unread Team or Channel mentions are in the channel.

Some Channel At-Mentions: What is the difference between at-mentioning a Team and at-mentioning a Channel? When you at-mention a Channel, only people who have favorited the channel will see activity alerts.

Usage Tip: If you break your Team up into channels that aren’t deeply interconnected, individuals can favorite and follow the channels where they are actively involved and check other channels when they’ve got some time. You can at-mention the channel for important messages without overwhelming the whole team with alerts.

While the channel is marked as bold to indicate unread messages, I don’t get any notification about the at-mention. How do you mark a channel as a favorite? Just click that star to the right of the channel name (favorite channels also appear in the initial channel list so you don’t have to expand “X more channels” to see them).

Now a message which at-mentions the channel …

alerts me. A lot 😊

 

Typos happen – especially in quick, “instant messaging” type communication tools like Microsoft Teams. There is a spell checker to identify mistakes that aren’t words.

But spell check doesn’t catch everything.

Beyond mistyped characters, my thread would be nicer if I had included a subject! And even if my message was perfect when posted, processes change and information becomes incorrect. Because Teams conversations are persistent, out-of-date instructions are going to turn up in search results. Instead of creating a new thread with the updated instructions, I return to the old post and edit it. Changed posts do move to the bottom of the channel (and create an activity alert for individuals who follow the channel). In private chats, edited messages do not appear as new activity, so I’ll copy my updated message and post it into the chat again.

How do you edit a message? In either the chat or channel conversation, click on the ellipses in the upper right-hand corner of your message (these controls only appear when your mouse is over the message block).

Select “Edit”

Your message is open in the basic editor. To add a subject, click the “Format” button to open the expanded editor.

Edit your message – add a subject, correct typos or update content. When you are done, click the check-mark to save your changes. Or if you no longer wish to edit the message, click the “X” to cancel.

And, yes, people will be able to see that you edited the message. They won’t see what you edited … but the phrase “Edited” will appear right next to the message timestamp. What about messages that no longer apply? Put in the wrong place? You can a message them to explain why it is no longer valid. Or you can delete it. To delete a message, click the ellipsis in the upper right-hand corner of your message and select “Delete”.

While there is no “are you sure?” prompt, you can undo the deletion. Note that the “This message has been deleted” banner remains in the thread. So until there’s better delineation between ‘reply’ and ‘start a new thread’, everyone is going to know you replied in the wrong spot 😊

What about someone else’s message? You can only edit messages you have posted. In private chats, only the person who sent the message can delete it. In channel discussion, Team owners can delete any message (including messages posted by a bot or connector).

 

Microsoft Forms offers a nice mechanism for collecting survey results, and I often post Forms links to my Teams chats and meetings. But that means I’ve planned for the survey – it takes some time to build the survey, after all! For ad hoc surveys, I’ve been using a third-party Teams app, Polly. Unfortunately, Polly isn’t an approved place for storing company information … so while I’m happy to ask where people want to get lunch or if anyone needs a quick break, I don’t want to ask questions that contain company proprietary information.

Forms has a Teams bot that quickly creates a quick one-question survey. You’ll need to have Forms installed in your Teams space. Click on the “Store” icon, search for Forms, and select Microsoft’s Forms.

Select the name of the Team to which you want to add Forms and click “Install”.

Click “Setup” next to “Bot” to add the forms bot to your Teams space.

Now you can at-mention Forms and create a quick one-question survey. ** This works fine if you are using the Teams desktop client. In the Teams web client, adding the question removes the at-mention link (the @Forms text changes from purple to black). To create quick forms in the web client, I have to type the question/answer bit first, then hit ‘home’ to get to the front of the message and add @Forms **

Help will be displayed to remind you of the question/answer format.

Type your question and answers and send the message.

Forms will create a new post with your survey.

Survey results will be updated in real-time in the thread.

If you want to view detailed results (or export the results to Excel), visit https://forms.office.com The Forms bot creates a “Group form”, so you’ll need to select the “Group forms” tab. Click on the Teams space where you posted the form.

You’ll see the form – they’re readily identifiable because the form name starts with “<at>Forms</at>” followed by the question you posted. Select the form and you can view response details and open the response results in Excel.

One oddity – if you host a meeting in the Teams space, you can at-mention Forms to create a survey in the meeting chat. The response from the Bot – where people vote – does not appear in the meeting chat because the bot response is a new thread.

Team members will find the survey as a new thread in the channel.

This is a little confusing to me, so I just send the message to create the survey in the channel instead of using the meeting chat. Using the meeting chat would, however, associate the survey with the meeting because the message which prompted the form creation will appear in the meeting chat.

 

If you use Microsoft Teams in your browser, the browser allows you to zoom in and out. You can do the same thing in the Teams desktop client – hold your Ctrl key and hit + (plus) to zoom in or – (minus) to zoom out. The zoom level will display briefly in the center of the screen.

 

Beyond being fun, emojis are great for quickly finding something – instead of reading all of the channel names, I can quickly scan to find the video icon or little balloon.

To add a new channel, click the ellipsis next to the Team name and select “Add channel”

In the channel name field, hold the Windows key on your keyboard and type a full stop (period, dot, “.”). Now you’ll have an emoji keyboard.

Select an emoji and type some text.

Alphabetically, an emoji is first – so “🎞Training” will sort before “A Channel”. You can still at-mention channels with emojis in the name. For this to work well, make sure you have spaces around the emoji character. When I have a channel named “🎈Party Planning”, I cannot use @party as the at mention – Teams tells me it doesn’t find any matches.

I can use @planning to find my channel.

If I rename the channel to “🎈Party Planning” with a space between the balloon and ‘Party’, I can at-mention @party and find my channel.

And, yes, you can rename existing channels (except for the “General” channel which cannot be renamed) to include emojis – click on the ellipses next to the channel and select “Edit this channel”.

Hold the windows key and press . to bring up the emoji keyboard. Select an emoji and save the changes to your channel.

Did you know … you can use emojis in Teams channel names?

Beyond being fun, emojis are great for quickly finding something – instead of reading all of the channel names, I can quickly scan to find the video icon or little balloon.

To add a new channel, click the ellipsis next to the Team name and select “Add channel”

In the channel name field, hold the Windows key on your keyboard and type a full stop (period, dot, “.”). Now you’ll have an emoji keyboard.

Select an emoji and type some text.

Alphabetically, an emoji is first – so “🎞Training” will sort before “A Channel”. You can still at-mention channels with emojis in the name. For this to work well, make sure you have spaces around the emoji character. When I have a channel named “🎈Party Planning”, I cannot use @party as the at mention – Teams tells me it doesn’t find any matches.

I can use @planning to find my channel.

If I rename the channel to “🎈Party Planning” with a space between the balloon and ‘Party’, I can at-mention @party and find my channel.

And, yes, you can rename existing channels (except for the “General” channel which cannot be renamed) to include emojis – click on the ellipses next to the channel and select “Edit this channel”.

Hold the windows key and press . to bring up the emoji keyboard. Select an emoji and save the changes to your channel.