Changes added 29th of June: Notifications in a channel have been made a lot easier, updated bellow.
Something I have a hard time to wrap my head around sometimes is notifications in Microsoft Teams. There are a bunch of different notification triggers and I often ask myself when I get notifications and when not.
Let’s explore the different ways of getting notifications.
Notifications in a chat / group chat
When someone writes in a chat that you’re a part of you get an instant notification – just as you are used to in other instant message apps. The notification disappears when you open the chat. These notifications appear in the chat tab as seen on the image.
Mute notifications in a chat
In case you get tired of all the notifications in your busy life, you can mute a chat by clicking … and click mute. The opposite goes for unmuting.
But don’t worry, you will still see that you have new messages as the text is bold when you haven’t read everything.
If you are unsure if you muted a chat or not, you can just look at the icon. If it’s a bell with a strikethrough then the chat is muted.
Making sure someone gets a notification in a chat
If you really want to make sure the person you want to talk to gets the message you should type @ and choose the specific person – this is called to mention someone. In that case the person will get a notification in the activity tab as well independent of she/he muted you or not.
Notifications in a team
Since I wrote this blog post notifications in a team have changed a few times. With the recent change it's actually easy to understand.
For each channel in a team there is something called notification settings. There you can decide what specific settings you want for that specific channel. Perfect if you want different settings for different channels in the same team.
Click ... of the channel you are interested in changing the settings for and click Channel notifications.
You can decide if you want notifications for new posts, if you want to include replies and for channel mentions.
As a standard all notifications are set to off when you create a new team - so don't forget to help your team members to set the best settings for them.
But don’t worry, if someone writes in any of the channels you don't have notifications for, they will be bold just as for unread messages in a chat.
The activity tab
So - what about the activity tab I mentioned? In the activity tab you will see new notification and your history. Some of the things you will get notifications for here is:
When you have been @ mentioned
Someone replies in a thread you started
When someone write in a channel you enabled notifications for
Someone likes a message you have written
When you have a missed call
When you are added to a new team/channel
It is easy to filter if you a looking for a specific message by clicking the funnel.
The standard view in the activity tab is your feed, but you can also change to your activity to see what you been up to in Microsoft Teams 😊.
Key takeaways?
If you should take anything from this blog post it is that the best way to make a person see your message is to mention @ them and the best way to make a team keep track is to instruct them to adjust the notification settings for the relevant channels.