Are there any plans to design Teams to utilize the chat/messaging feature for Windows Active Directory networks? As of now, the conversation/chat ability is not even viable for a network with many departments for the following reasons:
- Teams does not have the ability to pull in or import Active Directory groups to create their corresponding team. Each team for each department has to be created manually and then each user from Active Directory has to be manually added to their appropriate team - very time-consuming.
- You cannot send messages to another team within your network that you are not a member of. There are many occasions when a member of one team needs to send a message to an entire group/team that is in another department, but in order to do that they have to be a member of that team which does not make sense. In order to make this possible every employee would have to be a member of every team which would defeat the purpose of having multiple teams to begin with. You might as well have just one team called "All Users" and be done with it.
- Whenever you send a message to a user or team, the message pops up on the screen and disappears after 15 seconds, and after it disappears there is no notification on the taskbar or anywhere on the screen that the user received a message, and they will go about the day none the wiser. This does not even make sense. There are many times when I need to send an alert to the network about critical issues such as bringing the network down, rebooting a server, or rebooting a phone system, and if I send them a message using Teams and they are away from their desk for a few minutes, when they return they will be completely unaware of anything that is about to occur unless they physically opened up their Teams app and looked to see if they missed any messages while they were away from their desk. Most people will not do this as they are too busy doing their work.
It would appear that Teams is designed mostly for the home user or at the very least those people who work from home and use video conferencing quite a bit. I do use Teams quite a bit for video conferences with other organizations for various business reasons, but I have been forced to find other instant messaging software to meet our inter-office communication needs. It just seems given that Microsoft Teams is a Microsoft product and Windows Active Directory is a major Microsoft feature for networking, it would make sense to design the communication aspect of Teams to be better suited for Windows networks.
I have tried installing plugins for Teams like the Company Communicator, but that software is completely useless for instant messaging capabilities within a network. It still only pops up the message for 15 seconds and then goes away. Also, the popup doesn't even tell you what the message is. The title of the message doesn't even show up on the popup. All the popup says is "Sent a card". I have searched and searched for other plugins, but unfortunately, there does not appear to be one that exists with the features I listed above.
So, are there any plans to improve the chat/instant messaging/conversation feature in Teams to work with Windows Active Directory networks?
