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About this lesson
Explore how to post messages to a channel including formatting messages and adding files. Also, learn how to use @mentions and see how notifications work in real time.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Using Teams, Chat, and Mentions- Single Tenant.docx.docx51.8 KB Using Teams, Chat, and Mentions - Single Tenant - Solution.docx.docx
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Quick reference
Using Teams, Chat, and Mentions
Much of the activity in Teams involves team chats. Using @mentions in Teams helps to ensure that people are alerted to the activity they need to act on or are interested in.
When to use
Anytime you need to post a message to the team or individuals within the team.
Instructions
You start a new post in the channel by typing in the text box at the bottom of the Posts feed. If the channel is not private, anything post here is visible to the entire team. Click on the "A" icon underneath the text box to open message formatting options including allowing you add a highlighted Subject line to your post. Enter an @ sign to bring up a list of people or groups that can be mentioned in the message. People who are @ mentioned will receive a pop-up notification they have been mentioned in teams allowing them to reply promptly.
Hints & tips
- Each channel has its own Posts feed (chat).
- @mentions can also be groups (if available) as well as individuals. When you type "@" a usable options are listed in a pulldown.
- You can attach files in the Teams chat which are then automatically available to everyone on the team.
- Make good use of the formatting options to ensure readability of your posts.
- 00:04 Teams can help you collaborate with other people and help them collaborate with you.
- 00:08 We'll learn about communicating effectively using posts in Teams.
- 00:12 And channels can be standard, channels available to everybody as you see here, or
- 00:16 they can be private channels available to only those who are invited.
- 00:22 When you select the channel, you'll see on the Posts tab,
- 00:25 the conversations that have happened in the channel.
- 00:27 This is very important as when new people are added to a team,
- 00:31 they can catch up on the conversations that have happened
- 00:33 without having to be briefed by somebody else.
- 00:36 This includes documents that have been posted as well as meetings
- 00:39 that have been posted.
- 00:40 These meetings by the way can be linked to recordings of the meetings,
- 00:43 which you can then review.
- 00:46 Each channel has its own conversation area.
- 00:49 So this means that conversations are scoped to a channel.
- 00:54 When you post into a channel, not everyone in the entire team will see it,
- 00:58 just the people who were in the channel conversation.
- 01:01 In this channel, you can save several conversations.
- 01:04 And you can hit Reply to any one of them by clicking on the Reply button, and
- 01:08 then you can reply back to Isaiah in this case.
- 01:11 To see an entire conversation, just click on the replies and
- 01:14 it will expand the thread.
- 01:16 To start a new conversation, go to the bottom of the screen where it says
- 01:20 to Start a new conversation, and then you can simply type what you wish.
- 01:27 And if you make a typo, no worries, you can simply click
- 01:33 on the ellipses and then click Edit to edit your post.
- 01:41 In addition, there are other things that you may want to do such as delete
- 01:45 the post or share it in Outlook.
- 01:48 It's easy to attach a file to a conversation
- 01:51 by simply clicking the paperclip icon and then indicate where you
- 01:54 want to source your file from either OneDrive or another team or channel.
- 01:59 And if you have, for example, box or
- 02:01 Dropbox that will show up here too potentially,
- 02:04 you can upload from your computer, and the document will be uploaded into Teams.
- 02:11 And we'll make a comment about the document so
- 02:13 people know what it is, click Enter and post the document with the comment.
- 02:18 In addition to attachments, you can add gifts to your responses,
- 02:21 you can add stickers as well.
- 02:23 Stickers can be a lot of fun because you can add your own comments to them and
- 02:27 customize the text to be whatever you like.
- 02:30 So we'll change this to Let's Go!
- 02:32 Click Done and it'll post to the team chat.
- 02:34 You can also say meet now to start ad hoc meeting in real time with your team
- 02:38 members.
- 02:40 And there are other choices here as well to explore.
- 02:43 By clicking on the A icon, you can format your text so
- 02:46 that you could improve your posts attractiveness and readability.
- 02:51 So we'll type this as the agenda,
- 02:53 which will then be highlighted in the post whenever it's visible to the team.
- 02:58 Next, we'll just type in some placeholder content and we'll click bullets here and
- 03:02 we'll post this.
- 03:05 Now, you can see a headline here along with formatted text.
- 03:09 This can significantly improve readability and long lists.
- 03:12 So you can compare this, for example,
- 03:14 to here where a title has been used or subject has been used in these.
- 03:19 And as you can tell the subjects just kind of pop.
- 03:22 When you're posting information to a conversation and
- 03:25 you mentioned somebody by name, you can use an @Mentions in order to cause them to
- 03:30 be alerted to the fact that they were mentioned in a team conversation.
- 03:34 This is a very powerful way to ensure that the relevant people to a conversation
- 03:38 are notified that something is happening that deserves their attention.
- 03:42 To use @Mentions, you begin with an @ sign.
- 03:45 And this brings up a list of everybody that's available.
- 03:48 And now, we begin to type it.
- 03:49 We can say @Isaiah, and by simply typing I-S it filters down to Isaiah,
- 03:54 click on his name and post a message that let's talk right away.
- 04:00 Now, I've switched into a view or you can see Megan on the left and
- 04:04 Isaiah on the right so that you can see how this works in real time.
- 04:08 And so Megan will simply use the @Mentions for Isaiah and press Enter.
- 04:12 Or on the right, you can see that in real time, Isaiah gets a post that says,
- 04:17 hey dude, you've been mentioned, you might want to check that out.
- 04:21 So he can either click on this which will then launch into conversation and
- 04:25 can see immediately that this is the message and
- 04:28 here this little @ sign means you are mentioned.
- 04:31 Now, Isaiah can return the favor.
- 04:34 But in this case, he's going to respond by saying, let's talk to the whole team.
- 04:38 So he'll say @channel, everybody that is subscribed to the legal and
- 04:44 compliance channel notifications will get this notice and
- 04:50 say, team meeting announcement.
- 04:53 And when he clicks this,
- 04:54 everybody who's subscribed to the channel will get a notification.
- 04:58 And now you can see Megan sees her notification that there's something she
- 05:02 needs to pay attention to.
- 05:04 And she can click on this again and
- 05:05 see the response here, not only to just Megan, but to everybody in the channel.
- 05:11 In order to see channel notifications,
- 05:14 you generally need to be subscribed to the channel notifications.
- 05:17 Which you can do by clicking the dot dot dot, the ellipses,
- 05:20 and select that you wish to receive channel notifications.
- 05:25 So as a best practice for people who are important to a channel conversation,
- 05:29 they should select to receive channel notifications.
- 05:32 And in that way when you do what Isaiah just did,
- 05:35 the channel notification will pop up for all those people.
- 05:39 While you're here, if this channel is important to you, you may choose
- 05:42 to pin the channel to the top of your list so that it will always be visible to you.
- 05:47 And this way as lists get longer because of teams and channels get added to
- 05:51 the system, they can flow out a view and you want important ones to pop to the top.
- 05:55 So you can do that by using pin.
- 05:58 So let's take a moment and review.
- 06:00 Channels in Teams can be either public or private.
- 06:03 And each channel has its own chat activity.
- 06:06 A journal of all that activity can be reviewed by team members at any time.
- 06:11 You can add files, meeting requests, you can even post GIFs or stickers to a post.
- 06:17 It's a good practice to format posts so that they have better readability.
- 06:20 You can use @Mentions in a post to ensure that the people that you're talking with
- 06:25 are alerted on either their mobile devices or their computers.
- 06:29 In addition, you can alert the entire channel to important information.
- 06:33 When you have a channel that you really want to pay attention to,
- 06:36 subscribe to the channel to ensure that you get all the notifications.
- 06:39 And you can of course, pin that channel to the top of your list so it's easy to find.
- 06:45 So using chat in Teams is a great way to communicate with your channel, but
- 06:49 what if you want to do a one on one conversation?
- 06:51 Let's talk about that next.
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