@Mention a Team from Another Team

[Nick Perfetto]

I'd like to be able to @mention a Team in a channel for another Team. For example so somebody in a Marketing channel can @mention the Tech Team to bring their attention to something. Is this possible?

[#2]

No, sorry! All @mentions is kept within the team!

[#3]

Bummer. Thanks for the response.

[#4]

Not possible, but this is why you have Cross functional Teams that have many groups in a Team then you use channels and @channel mentions. So if you have Marketing channel where everyone in marketing favorites their channel, and a Tech Team channel that they favorite, then when @channel mentions are used it works as you describe, but you need to create higher level teams to do this cross functional Team communications.

[#5]

Hi @Nick Perfetto

The guys are right that you can't @ mention teams outside of the one you are in.

The only other workaround I can think of, in addition to what @Chris Webb has said, is to use Copy Link to put the initial post into another Teams channel (assumes you have access to the Tech Team).

Example:

1. From within your Marketing channel, find a post you want to alert the Tech Team about, click onto … > Copy Link.

2. Paste it into a Tech Team Channel (e.g. General) and @ mention Tech Team, put some detail to describe the link, and post it when ready. 

The Tech Team should be able to see your message and the original post.

If your members cross pollinate both Teams as Chris has suggested, this should work (Note: I have not as yet tested to see if it works if you are not in that team as it hasn't been a requirement for my company per your scenario).

Hope that helps in some way?

Best wishes

Damien

[#6]

Every idea helps in some way. The main goal is that I am part of the Tech Team and because I create all the Teams (we're still rolling it out) so I'm a part of a lot of Teams. Trying to pay attention to all the different Tech channels in the other Teams is a bit cumbersome and end users are still learning how to do things @mentions are a new concept that they may or may not ever grasp. If they @mention the channel everybody in the Team will see the alert when only the techs need to see it and if they @mention a specific tech than only that tech will see the alert.

[#7]

Channel @channel mentions will not mention the entire Team, it will only mention anyone that has the channel as a favorite. So people can manage if they want these @mentions or not. You used to be able to see who favorited a channel on the channels tab in Teams but for whatever reason they removed this awhile ago. Also @general channel will mention the whole team since you can't favorite that channel.

They are working on the ability to see who favorites or "joins" a channel in the near future, I think before year end so that will be nice to have again to know who gets a channel mention, but channel mentions are great way to control mentions to sub groups of people in a team. And in your case if you have multiple groups you want a shared Team for those groups and you can make use of this channel mention method to pinpoint different groups in channel mentions.

[#8]

Since it is clear from the responses in this thread, @mention works within a Team. I wondered why it was done like that. I did little research and reason was "Teams" are a space for private collaboration not open collaboration - weird right? Instead, Microsoft proposes "yammer" as the public or open collab space if we want to share with many "teams" instead one private "team". Basically, this enforces us to choose these tools based on the purpose/objective.

[#9]

I disagree. As you can make use of org teams or larger teams containing larger set of workgroups or include other business units that work with your department often into your larger department team and utilize channel mentions from that. Now in large orgs 1k+ Org teams can’t be used but you can still incorporate larger teams for this purpose under 2.5k but if it’s larger than that yammer is the go to.

[#10]

Yeah, and I guess Microsoft careful about going into its different services too much! But as said Yammer is Microsoft’s service regarding organizational communication! The cross team @Chris mentioned is also a great way actually

Adam

[#11]

I both agree and somewhat disagree :) Org-wide teams have its advantages and yammer it’s own! I would say if you need communication solely between different departments, yammer weights over! But then again, all organizations don’t look alike and there is always pros and cons

[#12]

Yup, no right way, got to look at both and understand how each works and the features they do and don't have, and use what makes sense for your org.

[#13]

Out of curiosity, how large is your organisation?

How you govern your use of Teams in these early stages is critical to the long term success.

Sometimes having too many teams and overlap of tech channels everywhere can be a problem versus say just having a Tech Team (group) itself and having all staff added to this Team by default so they can leave messages.

Depends on a few factors though.

[#14]

Not very big. Maybe 200 employees. Yeah I'm trying to get it right now since if it actually gets adopted changing things later will be tricky. The real answer is to not do this and teach people to submit issues through our ticketing system.

[#15]

Hi @Nick Perfetto

I'm also on the tech team for my company we have the same issue although no one submits tickets via Teams as they usually use email, instant messaging and calls (Skype and/or Teams), or come up in person for help.

*Maybe* as a thought you could put a web tab with a link to your ticketing system into each General channel if you really wanted to go down that road.

Otherwise as you say, I'd be pushing them to the ticketing system and staying off teams unless you use it to communicate with the staff member when actioning a ticket?

Since you only have 200 staff, you are in the sweet spot for shaping this so maybe have a think about how you want to build your governance for this moving forward.

Sounds like you are heading in the right direction!

Cheers

Damien

[#16]

Has there been any new development on this being a feature?

[#17]

No, and honestly don't think it will happen due to the member/permission discrepancies between Teams. However they have released Tagging (Targeted Communications) that can serve a similar purpose.

You can create a tag of the People from the other Team and then use that tag with @tag mention to mention that group.

So if you have a Team Shared by say IT and Marketing folks, and both have their own Teams. You can create a tag called Marketing in this shared Team. Then @MarketingTag in that shared Team to tag the marketing folks.

It's an additional item you will have to maintain membership with since there is no current integration with flow etc. But it's better than nothing and is a useful feature for mentioning other groups in a larger team.

Here is the article on the feature: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-tags