Office 365 notification MC223441 issued on 3 October brings the earthshattering news that Teams is adding the ability for users to mark their status as Offline. As explained in Microsoft 365 roadmap item 68727, this delivers the benefit that users “have full access to Teams while signaling to colleagues that they are unavailable.” Microsoft says that the feature will roll out in mid-October and will be complete by the end of the month.
Setting Offline Status
There’s not much to be said in terms of implementation. The new option appears at the bottom of the list of other status values (Figure 1). You can also set your status to Offline by typing /Offline into the command box.
Figure 1: Setting a Teams presence status to Offline
In passing, notice the Teams admin center link in my settings menu. I haven’t seen this before but it’s a simple, good idea to put a link here to allow people who manage Teams for a tenant to have fast access to the admin center. The link doesn’t show up unless your account possesses a role which allows access to the Teams admin center, like global administrator or Teams service administrator.
How Offline Status Shows Up
Once set, offline status is shown as a white circle with a grey edge (Figure 2). It’s the same visual indicator shown when Teams determines that someone is offline because they aren’t signed in rather than just hiding behind the status for their own reasons, like getting some peace from the demands of pesky coworkers.
Figure 2: How the Teams presence status shows up as Offline
Offline and Do Not Disturb
Some might argue that the existing Do Not Disturb (dnd) status was quite sufficient to warn coworkers that they are busy and unavailable. The rebuttal is that when others see a do not disturb status, it’s a sign that although you are unavailable right now, some hope exists that you might soon become available. Setting your status to Offline puts you into a state where (hopefully) coworkers won’t even bother trying to get in touch. They’ll probably send email instead and maybe be bemused when they don’t receive an out of office notification.
Setting your presence status to Offline allow pop-up notifications for chat messages sent by other users. Use Do not disturb if you want to suppress these messages and only allow notifications people on your priority access list.
This is an example of a change that translates into exactly one sentence in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. But if you don’t keep an eye on the small details, you’ll miss out on the really important material.
I’ve been seeing it in my client, but it doesn’t appear to be working. I’m also looking for something within the Tenant policy wise to manage it. Some environments may not be to keen to allow all users to have this functionality. Have you found anything to control it’s availability? (no pun intended)
Is there any way for an Admin to change the status of a user’s account to Offline so that people don’t continue to send messages because they think the user is returning shortly ?
can we call while changing status to offline? And if yes, will the last seen of the status change? For Example, I changed status at 10Pm and had a call around 2 AM. Will the offline status show as “offline Yesterday” or “offline few hours”?
So when I’m in “appear offline” status, will it still show when I log in (despite constantly being in the “offline status”)? Usually, I see the time or date the other person was online when I move my cursor over their name.
Let’s say I changed my status to “appear offline” two days ago, but still open the program in the meantime without changing the status. Would the other persons only see that date (i.e. 2 days ago)?
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I’ve been seeing it in my client, but it doesn’t appear to be working. I’m also looking for something within the Tenant policy wise to manage it. Some environments may not be to keen to allow all users to have this functionality. Have you found anything to control it’s availability? (no pun intended)
There’s no policy to set Offline status.
In the mobile app there was a status of “Off work”. Now it is not there anymore. And mobile app doesn’t have “appear offline” status also.
Right. For now, this update is for the desktop client.
Can the other see how long Ive been gone if I just changed my status Offline but still working?
No.
If the status is set to offline, will the manager see the actual status “this person is hiding”?
No, they’ll see Offline.
Is there any way for an Admin to change the status of a user’s account to Offline so that people don’t continue to send messages because they think the user is returning shortly ?
No. This is a user function.
How to add offline in mobile Android teams app I am not able bro see option
The feature might not yet be available in the build of the Android app you’re using. Have you tried updating the app?
can we call while changing status to offline? And if yes, will the last seen of the status change? For Example, I changed status at 10Pm and had a call around 2 AM. Will the offline status show as “offline Yesterday” or “offline few hours”?
You can absolutely call when your status says offline. I can’t recall if the status is updated with some hourly indicator, but that’s easily tested.
So when I’m in “appear offline” status, will it still show when I log in (despite constantly being in the “offline status”)? Usually, I see the time or date the other person was online when I move my cursor over their name.
Let’s say I changed my status to “appear offline” two days ago, but still open the program in the meantime without changing the status. Would the other persons only see that date (i.e. 2 days ago)?
Hi does anyone know if the ‘offline’ status has to be re-set every day please? or will it stay ‘offline’ until I set it to ‘ available’ or whatever?