A New and Useful Teams Feature
One small but useful Teams feature is the ability for users to set their own status. This is different to setting a user’s presence status (Available, Busy, Do Not Disturb, etc.), which is intended to show if the user can join a meeting or chat. The free-form status is intended to give more personal or detailed information to co-workers, such as when you are traveling and won’t be able to respond to messages quickly.
User status messages support plain text and emojis and can be set using the desktop, browser, and mobile clients. On Windows, press the Windows key and period (.) to expose the set of available emojis. On Mac, use the Command-Control-Spacebar sequence. You can’t enter HTML-formatted text.
Setting a Teams Status Message
To set the status message, click on the avatar (picture) in the top right-hand corner of the Teams browser or desktop and select Set status message from the menu. On Teams mobile, click the waffle menu (top left-hand corner), and select the status message shown there.
If you have a status message already set, Teams will display it. To delete your status message, click the wastebasket icon (Teams can clear the message automatically for you after a set period). To create or edit the status message, click the pencil icon and enter the text that you’d like to display to co-workers (Figure 1). The status message can be up to 280 characters. Note the Show when people message me checkbox. When set, Teams shows your status message when people @mention you in chats and channel conversations. Your status message also appears when someone messages you in a personal chat.
As shown in Figure 1, you can choose how long you want Teams to display the status message. The options are:
- Today (until midnight)
- 1 hour
- 4 hours
- 8 hours
- 12 hours
- 2 days
- 5 days
- Always
When the period expires, Teams removes the status message from the account.
Viewing User Status Message in Teams
If a user sets the Show when people message me checkbox, Teams displays their status message above the compose message form.
You can also see a person’s status message in their people card. Click on their picture anywhere it appears in Teams to expose their people card (Figure 3).
For example, Teams displays people cards for members of a team when you view the membership with the Manage team option. You can click on or hover over each member to see the current status message in their people card.
Interestingly, guest users can set a status message. This probably means that the status is stored as a property of the user in the Teams directory rather than Azure Active Directory. Guests can also see status messages of other users in host tenants.
Post updated on 26-Apr-2020.
For more information about Teams, see Chapter 13 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.