Teams Tips #2 – Drawing Attention

Hey everyone,

Back with some more tips for Teams, this time – drawing attention!

When dealing with many channels and as more and more are created it is quite the challenge to keep up with everything that’s going on.

While someone might be involved in only certain channels, sometimes that person’s input is required or alternatively, this really interesting project you want to learn more about is discussed in another channel and you want to get notified.

So here’s a double-tip:

Draw your own attention – Follow channels!

If you favorite a channel it will always appear in your list of channels and yes, it will appear in bold text when there’s a new thing going on but let’s be honest – that might not be enough. Teams also allows us to Follow a channel, this will ensure you get notified when there’s activity in the channel (even if you didn’t favorite it).

to do that, simply click on the menu button (…) for the channel and select follow:

if you wish to unfollow, just repeat the same action and select unfollow:

Draw someone else’s attention – @mention them

This might be an obvious one but you’d be surprised how easy it is to forget that the people you’re trying to talk to might not be following your every move and just waiting for input.

If the person you’re looking for is not following the channel in which you posted, they might miss your conversation, the solution is easy, use the @mention capability and they will receive a notification there is a message directed at them.

To do so, simply type in the @ sign with the name of the person and select the person you’re trying to reach.

Note that you can also mention a channel or even the whole team as shown below.

Mentioning a channel will notify the people who have it as a favorite and mentioning the team will notify… you guessed it – the entire team.

If you think this is too much power for your team members, mentioning teams and channels can be disabled at the Team level:

That’s it for now – hope you find this helpful!

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