Using Tags in Microsoft Teams channels

With the increase of Microsoft Teams usage during the virus stay-at-home orders, the message traffic in various channels has skyrocketed. This can make it hard to notice things that are relevant to you and your job function. A new feature called Tags can make it easier to target messaging to specific groups of people in a channel. Here’s how it works…

If you are an Owner of a Microsoft Teams workspace, you can go into the list of members of the workspace to apply Tags to any member of the workspace. These Tags, when used with an @ symbol, will notify anyone in the group who has that Tag applied to their name:

To apply a Tag, click on the Tag icon for their name:

You can create a new Tag name, or enter the name of an existing Tag:

In this example, I’m applying a tag called TechDebt to Sandra’s entry in this particular Teams workspace:

I’ve done the same for myself, so now Sandra and I have the TechDebt applied to our names:

Now when I create a new message in a channel, I can use the Tag name prefaced with the @ symbol to allow the two of us to be notified of the new entry:

Here’s what the message looks like with the Tag applied. Please note that this does not hide the message from everyone else in the channel. It’s just a way to notify anyone with that Tag that the message exists, and it won’t get lost among other messages in a busy channel: