Making yourself heard on Microsoft Teams could be about to get a lot easier (and a lot louder) thanks to a new update.
The video conferencing service has announced it is working on a new feature that will allow chat participants to mention everyone in a group all at once.
Similar to how users can currently “@ mention” a particular person within a chat, Microsoft Teams users will now be able to have the option to @ mention “Everyone’. Doing so will mean all participants in the chat will receive a notification, meaning everyone will get a nudge, but also leading to a potentially deafening cacophony of pings and alerts on devices across your office.
Microsoft Teams @Everyone
In its entry on the official Microsoft 365 roadmap (opens in new tab), the company says that the new feature will be, “removing the hassle of mentioning each person’s name one by one or missing someone.” Just how true (or anxiety-inducing) this may prove to be, time can only tell.
The feature seems to take inspiration from Microsoft Teams’ great rival Slack, which already allows chat participants to mention everyone in a chat by typing “@here”.
The new addition is currently listed as being “in development”, but has a projected general availability date of December 2022, so users shouldn’t have too long to wait. Upon launch, Microsoft says the feature will be available to all users across Android, Desktop, Web, Mac and iOS.
The news is the latest upgrade to the Microsoft Teams chat feature as the company looks to make the platform a comprehensive communications offering for users everywhere.
This includes a fix that will let users track down full chat conversation threads after clicking on a search message results. The update means that when users search for a chat message in Microsoft Teams and click on a message result, they are taken to a view that contains the full thread that features the desired message, rather than just a single line of text as had been the case.
Recently, it also made it possible to blend consumer and business accounts, allowing corporate users to launch chats and meetings with clients and partners that might be using their personal Teams login.