Using Tags in Teams

[Laurie Pottmeyer]

Hi there - 

I wanted to share one of the features that I am starting to use a lot that many of you might find useful and that's adding a tag to an individual.  @Annie Colonna  just wrote a blog about it here so check it out when you have a minute.

I have a group of 16 people that are part of an advisory board for a project I am working on.  They are external guests in my tenant and not part of any other group within my organization.  From time to time, I want to call their attention to something - typically when I need a review of some sort.  I do not want to send email because the docs live in the team and I want to collect feedback within the doc and/or in the channel conversation about the topic.  So - I created a tag for Advisory Board and every time I want to call their attention to an ask I have, I @ mention the tag and they get a notification. 

This is in lieu of @ mentioning an entire channel, @ mentioning all 16 people in the conversation (no one has time for that), or leaving the conversation there for them to stumble over...with the increased amount of Teams traffic, it is increasingly difficult for people to find conversations they need to respond to without a tag.  

Anyway - I wanted to share - I hope this is useful.  Thanks for documenting in the blog, Annie!  I know the team wants your feedback on this feature so if you are using it, let us know what you think.  Thank you!

[#2]

Have been using it for demoing different Care units like elder homes etc where every role is a tag for easy reach in certain situations. Both from a tag mention using tags and start a group chat from a tag

[#3]

@adam deltinger - That's a good one.  My next use-case will be in the MVP team I manage where I'd like to assign tags to each MVP who has a specific interest/focus area so that when I want to ask for feedback or call their attention to something, I can mention the tag for the same reasons - people don't always stumble upon things but I don't want to clutter everyone's activity feed with notifications to different channels they might be in with details they don't really care about.  Of course, this could create a lot of noise so I need to be strategic about what the tags are and make it opt-in.  

[#4]

I think you had the keywords there "could create a lots of noise" and since tags act just like atmentioning a person it can do a lot of harm if used too much. Harm would be = it feels like a noise, people turn off atmentioned notifications which is one of keys how Teams excels.
Tags can be really useful, and they can speed up lots of things since you don't need to know who you need to tag separately - you just need to know the tag that works for the situation.

Smart use of tags can decrease the number of group chats and keep the work transparent. In short: tags can replace some need for channels and group chats and make Teams a better place! Thank you for this post Laurie!

[#5]

@Vesa Nopanen I think for me, smart use of tags is going to reduce the amount of people @mentioning the entire Team or Channel.. This is a great improvement in that respect.

@Laurie Pottmeyer  Having used them for a few weeks now, the biggest ask I'm getting is around users self managing what tags are assigned to them. They don't want to create new ones, they just want to control which are assigned to them.

And a shameless self plug.. I wrote up my thoughts on the experience here.. 8-) http://www.myfatblog.co.uk/index.php/2020/05/using-notification-tags-in-microsoft-teams/

[#6]

@paul - that is good angle of thinking for tags! :) Hadn't thought from that aspect.
A nice blog post. You could add that admins can define default tags for all teams in admin center. In fact they can create up to 25 suggested tags so teams can have "unified" tag names.

I think this is a nice v1 for tags but there is a lots of room for improvements.