Use case to @mention a non-member into a one-off channel conversation

[John Tropea]

Great to see you can now add non-members of a Team to a channel meeting by adding their email address in the channel meeting invite, or sending them the "copy join info" link once a channel meeting has started.

Is there a similar feature in the works for the conversations feed?

Use Case >> I'm having a channel conversation about a new Marketing Strategy which has brought up a technology question, so we wish to ask an IT expert a question to help us out. This IT expert is not a member of our Team (and we don't want them to be, and neither do they). So all we want to do is @mention them into this one conversation (they won't see anything in the channel, except this one conversation)

You can do this in Yammer, as Yammer allows you to participate in groups you have not joined.

...but at the moment in Teams, I have to switch to another tool to ask that IT person a question - which is quite a counter behaviour to one of the pillars of Teams ie. the "Hub"

[#2]

It's not currently possible, and it's annoying indeed. The closest you can get is use the "copy link" functionality, but that will only work if the user has access to the Team. There are however few UserVoice items on this already, for example: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/32535259--mention-like-yammer

[#3]

Thx Vasil...some good comments on UV

[#4]

There is always chat tab for this. But meetings should be treated like group chat and let anyone on it participate in chat. Then once the call is done you can always move those chat messages into the channel chat, or they could "sync" channel chat with a group chat during the call to get around the whole, so and so in the call needs access to the team to do chats etc. Then you could even @mention in the chat since that's supported. Just have that call sync that chat into the channel real time or something.

[#5]

Look like this is not happening...I wonder if it will happen another way eg @mentioning to Yammer within a Teams conversation

[#6]

Extremely disappointed to see this declined. Being able to "pull-in" a non-team member to the conversation seems like essential functionality. I would be satisfied if we could have a conversation that simultaneously exists in multiple channels and you could pull-in that channel through mentions. This would keep the conversation in a single stream in teams, where it is accessible to all relevant parties. Jumping out of the team chat to use direct chat splits the conversation and people have to cut and paste or relay info back and forth. Similar issues happen with Cross-posting, which is only available in the OP and then not even when editing.