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Microsoft Teams Blog
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Reach the right people faster with tags in Microsoft Teams

Annie Colonna's avatar
Annie Colonna
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 13, 2020

Knowing the right person or group of people to contact can be a continuous challenge. It’s difficult to remember every member of a project team, the owner of a process, or the appropriate expert. Searching through old emails, looking through paper lists of names, or asking other people to find the right contact can be time-consuming and frustrating. With targeted communication using tags in Microsoft Teams, you can now organize users within your Team based on attributes such as role, skill, or expertise. Once tags are applied, you can quickly and easily reach the right people.  

 

Create and use tags in Teams

To get started with tags, find a Team on the left-hand side of the screen, select More options …, and choose Manage Tags. Here you can create tags:

Create a new tag

Once a tag is created, you can use the tag to reach people either with a chat or in a Channel post. In a Channel, you can @mention the tag so that the tag members will be notified.

Using a tag in a channel post

Here are some situations where tags might be able to help your group communicate and collaborate more efficiently.

  • Role-based work: In organizations where people often know the role of the person they need to reach, but they don’t know their name, tags can provide the right context to find them. For example, if I work in a role where I pass specific types of issues to a support team, I could create a CustomerSupport tag. Then, I could post a customer issue to a Channel Post and include @CustomerSupport so that the right people get notified.
  • Large Teams: Within large Teams, tags are middle ground between @mentioning an individual and @mentioning a Channel. For example, if I work in a retail store with a bunch of departments, I could create a Footwear tag for employees assigned to that department. Then, when I create a channel post to let the whole store know that two displays are going to be reorganized and include @Footwear to make sure employees in that department get the message.
  • Cross-functional project teams: For special projects where the members may not frequently work together, tags can be used as a light-weight way to create a project group. This is especially useful for short-term projects. For example, if I’m working on a new product design concept with some people from Marketing, Merchandising, and Branding, I could create a ProductAlpha tag for our group.
  • Identifying an expert or owner: Tags can also be helpful to identify an expert or a single point of contact. For example, if I work in a manufacturing plant, I might want to tag people with a specific safety certification.

Learn more and upcoming tagging capabilities

When using tags, here are some other things to keep in mind:

  • Pick a name that all members of the Team can easily understand.
  • Remember, Tags are only accessible to people who are members of the Team where the tag was created. 
  • There is currently a limit of 100 tags per Team and 100 members per tag. Each user can be assigned a maximum of 25 tags.
  • Tags can be disabled by the IT Admin or changes to tags can be controlled only by the Team Owner. If you don’t see tags, they may have been disabled in your environment. For more information, see the Manage Tags article.

To learn more about tags in Teams, check out the links below.

Right now, tags are maintained by Teams users. We’re currently working on new tag capabilities that will automatically apply tags to users based on when they are working. This functionality is backed by Shifts in Teams.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read about tags in Teams! We’d love to hear from you, if you have an idea for what you’d like to see next, please submit a suggestion on UserVoice.

Updated Apr 14, 2020
Version 4.0
  • lrubstello's avatar
    lrubstello
    Copper Contributor

    Great post Annie! Tags have proven very valuable for me in saving time for communicating to groups as well as being able to alert groups to communications without calling on a individual. I have found in many places within teams that being specific can also be a huge help, in this case adding a prefix to the tag for easy searching within a channel. Lets say my team is MSTeams, I would start the Tags with MSTeams (MSTeams Project, MSTeams Support..) so then when I start my mention @MSTeams, it will suggest to me the available tags. If this is done across teams it makes understanding what is available easy. But I am new to teams so very curious if others have found a need to do this?

  • ChapmanBryan's avatar
    ChapmanBryan
    Brass Contributor

    It would be way more adopted if you were able to @mention tags from any team or conversation within Microsoft Teams, rather than be limited to the teams the tag was created in.

  • UW_Scott's avatar
    UW_Scott
    Brass Contributor

    Is there a roadmap item for this?  I can't seem to find it.

    I ask because I am trying to figure out if this is even expected to work reliably yet, before investing in the rather substantial expense of working a Microsoft support request on the issue.  

    At least in our Edu tenant this simply tells owners they are not allowed, no matter which settings we turn on or how long we wait for that setting to take effect.  

    Our preferred state is to have it enabled for "Team owners" with the "Team owners can override who can apply the tags" on.  In the case of the latter, owners can change it, but it also has no effect.

  • Chaz Weber's avatar
    Chaz Weber
    Iron Contributor

    We have a few large teams that have channels for people of a certain role or members of the management team. Tags will contact these groups without managing a separate channel.

  • petwir's avatar
    petwir
    Copper Contributor

    I have automated the creation of MSTeams alerts into a custom channel from our production operations.  I am doing this with a Powershell script that builds and sends a json package.  Now I would like to add to this the ability to tag the oncall person to automatically bring the alert to their attention, but I have not been able to find a way to do so.  (This script already knows "who")

  • melkinsco's avatar
    melkinsco
    Iron Contributor

    In our GCC tenant, I'm an admin and site owner and I cannot see the Manage Tags option in my Teams.  Another owner in the same team does see the Manage Tags option. Any ideas on what I could be missing?  I'm used to weirdness on GCC, but this is a new level of head scratching.

  • DevLunsford's avatar
    DevLunsford
    Iron Contributor

    In case anyone is passing, would love the ability to have central tags, that would apply to 'anyone in the current team who's defined in that tag' so if you had an IT Department tag and every team has 1 or 2 IT people in it, the ITDept tag would tag those 2 people, and would continue to do so without additional maintenance if there was one day a different IT person in that team.

     

    Being able to sync a tag to an AAD group would be absolutely perfect. I'm having to try to fudge this myself from Power Automate - partly to try to wean people off broadcast emails in our org-wide team, so that you can still target smaller groups (where a separate channel isn't the solution).