Use @ Mentions in Microsoft Teams for Communication
Learn to use “@ Mentions” in Microsoft Teams to promote more effective and clear communication.
You may be familiar with the mention functionality on social media platforms. When you type “@” and then a person’s name, you’ll call their attention to your post. In Teams, it works the same way.
The “@ Mention” function in Teams offers the following options.
- @person
- @channel
- @team
Once you type the “@” symbol in a post in Teams, a list of suggestions for members within that team is displayed. You may choose from that list whom to mention. If a Team has many members, type the beginning of a person’s name to display only results that match what has been typed.
The “@ Mentions” function can also tag a channel or an entire team. In those cases, attention all members of the channel or team mentioned will be alerted to the post.
Mentioning a person, channel or team generates notifications for those mentioned. This makes sure your colleagues will always see a conversation. These notifications will appear in a variety of ways.
When a person is mentioned, their activity (the bell icon) will appear with a notification. The person’s activity feed will show who mentioned them and in which location. If a channel of which a person is a member is mentioned, that will also appear in their activity feed. In the team’s feed, any channels with new activity will appear in bold writing and have a notification indicator in red.
You may also notice small icons to the right of any post that includes a mention in Teams. These have different icons whether the mention is for a person, channel, or the entire team.
There are many benefits to using “@ Mentions” in your Microsoft Teams conversations. It will generate a more focused conversation, calling attention to specific relevant parties. It will also allow a post to be found more easily via the activity feed. Finally, the mention function notifies your colleagues of your post. This will encourage more immediate replies.
Try it for yourself and see how easy it is to use “@ Mentions” to be more productive in your team’s conversations. For more IT services and consulting to support you with Microsoft technologies, please contact us.