Sending Urgent messages in Microsoft Teams

If you use the Important indicator for messages you send in Microsoft Teams chats, you’ll see a new level of functionality now. You can mark a message as Urgent, and it will ping the user every two minutes until they look at your message. While it can really help to get someone’s attention when necessary, it comes with a couple of common sense caveats. Here’s how it works…

The Exclamation Point icon is where you mark a message as Important, and now it also allows you to mark a message as Urgent:

Once you click the icon, you can select from Standard, Important, and Urgent:

The thing to note here is that an Urgent message will continually ping the recipient every two minutes until they see your message. If you really want to take the chance you won’t irritate your recipient by doing this, click the Send icon:

This is how it shows up in the chat… an Alarm Bell icon is attached to the message:

Here is what the recipient sees as a pop-up in their Teams client:

This is definitely a case of “use it sparingly.” If everyone started sending me Urgent messages that kept pinging me until I got around to reading them, I would quickly put you on my “not well liked” list. However, if there’s an emergency (or if there’s cake in the break room), this is a great way to cut through clutter and get attention.