Ok - 10 days to the holiday now. And I'm in the thick of things trying to get everything tied up: all the deliveries, all the day-to-day, all the testing, all the DevOps items, the logistics, dog, you name it. And to be honest? It would probably be easier - and saner - to put the blog down for a few weeks. But I love doing it, so if I can squeeze a blog in then I will. And this week I am going to pause from Teams and Entra, and pivot to a few end user functionalities which came about through just playing around in Teams 2.1. First, this is the ability to silence everyone mentions, and second its the ability to prevent replies to posts in the general channel where even I found out something new about Teams. Now why would I want to do these things? Well, they make Teams less noisy. In the case of the everyone mention it triggers notifications for everyone in a group chat (they are not in channel conversations) and in my experience some who become aware of them begin to use them as a means to draw people's attention to what they want. Oh we've seen that over the years through features such as priority messaging and channel mentions. Yes. We know it can save your time and effort - just as it can be disruptive to my time and effort especially when I am in the flow of the work. In the case of stopping replies to posts in the general channel we've had the ability to restrict replies to posts in standard channels via channel moderation for some time. We've also had the ability to restrict posting in the general channel. However, we've not had the ability to stop replies to a post in the general channel. Given that general is often the primary/landing channel for the team its ideal for things like team updates, announcements, and mod-led instructions. In other words, replies are often neither required nor needed and are - in many cases - an opportunity for noise. So this will work for the general channel, indeed it'll work for any channel including private and shared. It still won't stop the ability to post in private and shared, but now we can limit both posts and replies in general and standard, and replies in all channels. So I personally think both of these are good steps forward. Do more with less noise.
Tag: Microsoft Teams Moderation
Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Moderating the Team’s Channels
Some channel conversations necessitate a lot of communication between team members. Others may just generate a significant amount of noise which has no real benefit for the Teams' productivity or which regularly goes off on a tangent from the work. Instead of an open style forum where everyone can post and reply, we may simply want a channel where its owners, or a set number of users such as SME's can post focused messages such as instructions, important content or updates for the team to consume. We may simply want a proportion of the team to observe others conversations. We may simply want it for announcements, or to lock down the channel for bots or connectors such as Twitter and Yammer. Whatever the use case, the moderation of Teams channels is about choice as much as it is about good governance as we now have the ability to have very focused channel communications - a very good thing for us all.
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