Using IM option to reply to email - no Subject line passed to Teams conversation

Copper Contributor

Back in the olden days - 2018 - when we used SfB instead of Teams for IM, one of the neat features was if you replied to an email with an IM it put the email Subject line in the SfB Title bar meaning the recipient could see the context of the reply.

 

Now that we have migrated to Teams, if I do the same operation it starts a conversation with the sender OK but does not include the Subject line, so unless I am responding to a recent email the recipient doesn't have a clue what I am talking to.  A couple of years ago during the Teams preview phase I raised a query regarding the lack of a Subject line in Chat and was told it wasn't needed in Chat and was only available in Teams conversations.  The real reason is that persistent chat doesn't lend itself to Titles/Subjects because it is just an endless scrolling dialogue.

 

Whatever the MS Product Marketing guys say Teams does NOT have feature parity with SfB yet as this omission means one of the best features of SfB - reducing internal emails by replying with a chat - is not possible in a practical sense.  Maybe they should take a look at Parlano if they want to see how a persistent chat app works....  The same comment applies to the lack of a visible Conversation History folder, search is NOT the answer to everything.

 

I am surprised these comments don't come up in the internal dog-fooding phase, or is it just because most MD dev guys don't have any real life experience of corporate messaging because they have grown up with Facebook/WhatsApp?

7 Replies
Have you created / voted on this on uservoice?
Do what we all do. Screen snip and paste the email inline in the chat, done. it would be a nice feature to at least prepopulate your chat maybe don’t have to go all out with subject field. I’ll bring it up next time I’m in Redmond ;).

@adam deltinger thought about it a couple of years back, but it will never get 500+ votes because most Teams users never used SfB in anger.  They have no idea what I am talking about as they have only ever used Facebook/Whatsapp for IM.   The bar is set very low.... :(

@Chris Webb "Do what we all do"??  Seriously?  You need to get out more is you think ordinary users are going to bother cut and pasting an email thread into a chat.  Or are you just having a joke with me as you seem to have mis-understood my post?

 

I did not request passing through the entire email thread content, just the Subject line will do nicely because it is easy to do a search in Outlook to find all 'related messages'.  Not sure what "going all out with the subject field" is referring to as a Subject line is available in Teams chat. 

 

The real issue is the change from SfB 'ordinary' chat to Teams 'persistent' chat. I doubt if any Millennial programmers have any idea what the difference is, may I suggest reading this article on why Microsoft acquired Parlano, I guess I am one of the few who actually did live implementations of this product as an add-on to an OCS install!

 

To summarise: Teams is not and never will have feature parity with SfB, my advice to Microsoft Marketing is to drop that tag line to stop people who have implemented both environments over the last 10 years wasting time with posts like this ;)

 

You need a Snickers. And your right it never will be Skype. It’s already superior. The only difference is you’ve entered get off my lawn stage of your life and can’t realize it for it’s good features that Skype wish it had.

And no I wasn’t joking that’s what those of us that actually have used Teams do. You know we adapt, we find ways of doing things until they do release the features we need.

They still haven’t forced Skype on those that use it yet. Until then. I don’t see the problem.

@Chris Webb we, as an organisation, have had SfB disabled last month, compleling all to use Teams. Yes it's good, but the reply with IM was a useful feature. It now isn't, precisely as @Nigel Horncastle described. Maybe I too have reached that stage in life. Reply with the subject line would work well to digitally de-clutter and give a quick reply when you can see the other person is active (green tick). Cut / paste.. not going to happen.

@Nigel Horncastle  I support this, this was a great feature since Lync time, It's a shame that Teams doesn't have it