Controlling Teams Trending and Suggested Notifications

More Traffic to Clutter Activity Feed

This might be heresy, but the Teams activity feed can be as annoying and cluttered as any email inbox. Notifications flow from channels and mentions, all demanding attention and potentially a response. Obviously, some control needs to be exerted over the activity feed as teams and channels grow otherwise the feed will swamp users.

The notifications section of Teams settings in all clients allow users to control the notifications which appear in the activity feed. For instance, you can decide that you only want to see notifications when people mention you in conversations, or when messages are posted to personal chats, but not for channel or team mentions. If your activity feed is getting out of hand, it’s a good idea to tweak your notification settings and take back control.

Automatically-Generated Trending and Suggested Notifications

Last year, Microsoft “trending” and “suggested” notifications. These notifications are generated automatically based on the signals captured in the Microsoft Graph from the teams a user belongs to. The idea is to create more involvement in Teams by letting users know what’s happening by highlighting conversations in the activity feed. By itself, there’s nothing wrong with the idea. It encourages greater participation in conversations and might bring something to the attention of users that they would otherwise miss. Specific icons in the activity feed mark these notifications. Figure 1 shows the (lightbulb) icon for a suggested notification.

Office 365 generates the automatic notifications based on information captured in the Microsoft Graph. The more activity happens in Teams, the better the information available about user behavior and habits for the Graph to analyze and the more valuable the automatic notifications will be.

The Downside

The downside of the extra notifications is that they might clutter the activity feed of uses who have tuned their notification settings to meet their needs. If you’re in this category, it’s easy to disable these notifications by switching off “Trending” in the notification settings in the Teams client (Figure 2). The mobile client looks different, but you can make the same change.

Tenant-Wide Disablement

And if you really don’t like the auto-generated notifications, you can disable them for the entire tenant in the Org-wide settings section of the Teams admin center (Figure 3). This overrides settings for individual users and Teams won’t include trending or suggested notifications in their activity feeds.

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