I’ve never been a huge fan of the Teams Praise app. As an acknowledged curmudgeon, lauding someone publicly with a decorative badge is not in my nature. But while not fully appreciating the usefulness of an app like Praise in the enterprise, I do see how it is useful in an education setting where goal achievement is often rewarded with public recognition.
All of which brings me to the topic of customizable praise for Teams, announced in Office 365 notification MC220516 on August 18 and due to roll out to tenants in December 2020 (it’s been delayed a little). According to Microsoft 365 roadmap item 64978, this is the “ability to create custom Praise badges (title, colors, images, language) that expresses company culture.” A tenant can create up to 25 custom praise badges for its own purposes.
A tenant can also create customized versions of the badges in the two sets (Default and Social and emotional learning badges for education) supplied by Microsoft. Each set has 12 badges, which are downloadable from the online documentation. The Praise app loads the default set unless you disable this in the app settings.
Building Custom Badges
The first thing to do is to figure out what purpose custom badges will serve. The reason why someone should use a badge to praise someone should be obvious. For instance, you might want to create a badge with your corporate logo, or one for top salespeople who overachieve their sales targets.
Once you’ve decided what custom badges to add, open Manage apps section in the Teams admin center, find the Praise app and access its settings (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Settings for the Teams Praise App
Scroll down to the Custom badges section and select the Add option. You’ll need to know:
Badge name: The name that appears in Teams and is visible to users. You can also enter localized badge names for the languages your tenant uses Teams in. If necessary, you can exclude locales where the badges are not to be used.
Image file: This is a PNG image of 40 KB or less. An inconsistency exists between the pixel dimensions given in the Teams admin center (288 x 288) and those stated in the online documentation (216 x 216). I used the larger value. A basic picture editor like Paint (Figure 2) can generate the PNG files.
Badge colors: You need to give hex values for two colors. One is used for the badge name (text color); the other is for the badge background. You can use sites like htmlcolorcodes.com to find the right color codes.
Figure 2: Editing a PNG file for a Teams Praise custom badge
When all the custom badge settings are input (Figure 3), click Apply to add the data to the settings of the Praise app.
Figure 3: Adding details for a new custom badge
Finally, click Submit (Figure 4) to have Teams publish custom badges for use with the Praise app. Microsoft suggests that you publish all custom badges together as it takes a little while before the new badges are available to Teams desktop and browser clients.
Figure 4: A set of custom badges for the Teams Praise app
Using Custom Badges
After publication, when users access the Praise app, custom badges are shown before the default set (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Custom Praise badges are listed before default badges
No difference exists in how custom badges are used. However, if you make poor color choices for the badge name and background, your custom badges might not look as good as the normal set. Take the example shown in Figure 6. The top version of the badge uses a hex color code of #242EF0 (a blue hue). The bottom version uses a white background (#FFFFFF) and looks much better.
Figure 6: Custom badges with different backgrounds
Artistic Badges Wanted
I’m still not a huge fan of the Teams Praise app, but I do like it when an app is customizable to meet organization-specific needs. Microsoft has done a good job of supporting custom badges. It will be interesting to see what kind of badges are produced.
I am a teacher and work in a large district. We don’t have admin privileges to Teams and that is the only way to add my own praise badges. This makes it un-useable to me. I hope they change this making each teacher able to manage their own badges without the admin permission.
While I understand your concern (and you should express the issue in Teams User Voice), I believe that they’ve done this to keep badges to a manageable amount. If everyone could define their own, you might create an unmanageable mess.
My organization is planning on enabling the badge app but before enabling that, I wanted to know if there is any backend data associated with badges. Our requirement would be to fetch the backend data and filter it on the basis of month, year, user who got a badge/praise, department, praise given by, etc.
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Hi! Im Admin in my tenant, but I dont see “Setting” when I open Badges in
Microsoft hasn’t quite released customizable badges. They delayed things a tad, maybe because of Ignite. Be patient and it will show up.
I am a teacher and work in a large district. We don’t have admin privileges to Teams and that is the only way to add my own praise badges. This makes it un-useable to me. I hope they change this making each teacher able to manage their own badges without the admin permission.
While I understand your concern (and you should express the issue in Teams User Voice), I believe that they’ve done this to keep badges to a manageable amount. If everyone could define their own, you might create an unmanageable mess.
Hi Tony,
My organization is planning on enabling the badge app but before enabling that, I wanted to know if there is any backend data associated with badges. Our requirement would be to fetch the backend data and filter it on the basis of month, year, user who got a badge/praise, department, praise given by, etc.
Thank you,
Raman
I don’t believe that a public Graph API exists to fetch the praise data. This might come in the future, but I don’t believe it exists today.
Check out this article on how to capture the data:
https://www.dapt.uk/post/capturing-praise-from-microsoft-teams
What ppi/dpi is the image?
I never really looked at the dpi. Any badges I created focused on the size.
This functionality has been disabled as of February 2022.
Yes, and I have updated the post. The change was announced in MC329432.