Teams Private and Shared Channels Get Support for Tags

Teams Tags for Private and Shared Channels Arriving Soon

One of the joys of producing a book about ever-changing technology is keeping an eye on individual updates announced by Microsoft. In some cases, a change can lead to a rewrite for a section in a chapter; others mean updating a few words; and some changes can be ignored because they’re not relevant to the book content.

Take message center notifications MC707674 and MC707670, both published on 17 January 2024. The first covers the support for tags in private channels (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 373545), the second covers the same support for shared channels (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 373555). A tag is a way of addressing a subset of team members. Some tags are created centrally and published to teams. Others are created for specific teams, and some are special tags that come with the product. The team owners tag is an example of the latter type.

Microsoft plans to roll out tag support for private and shared channels to targeted release tenants in mid-February 2024. Deployment to standard release tenants will follow in late March 2024.

Teams Tags for All Channel Types

Microsoft introduced private channels at the 2019 Ignite conference. Shared channels arrived in 2023. Team owners can create a mixture of up to 1,000 standard, private, and shared channels in a team, but up to now support for tags has only existed for standard channels.

Currently, assigning a tag to someone depends on team membership or roster. When Teams builds a membership roster for a team, it bases it on the membership of the team’s Microsoft 365 group. The roster becomes the set of valid users that can be included in tags and used in standard channels conversations. However, private and shared channels have different memberships to standard channels. Membership of a private channel is a subset of the overall team while membership of a shared channel can include people and teams who aren’t members of the team. Guest accounts can be members of private channels but not shared channels.

To enable tag support in private and shared channels, Microsoft adapted the roster creation process for each channel type to ensure that the right set of members can be tagged. They also updated the channel management GUI to incorporate tags, much like the existing tag management for standard channels (Figure 1).

Figure 2 shows tag management for a private channel (indicated by the lock icon in the top right-hand corner). Everything is as you’d expect and the options available to manage tags are the same, including a new ability to create a chat with people who are members of a tag. When you do this, Teams checks if you have an existing group chat with the members. If not, it creates a new chat. It’s a nice way to communicate with specific members in a team or channel.

You might also notice that the “Lawyers” tag includes an emoji. Tags can have names of up to 40 characters, including as many emojis as you like.

Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t yet updated the Graph API to allow access to tags defined in shared and private channels. When it does, I’ll update my Teams tag report script.

No More Suggested Teams Tags

While we’re discussing tags, let me note that Microsoft is in the process of deprecating suggested tags. These are standard tags created in the Teams admin center that teams can use if they wish.

The only announcement to date is in the documentation for tag management, but Microsoft has confirmed the retirement to me. The change is effective in the Teams 2.1 client (which is why you don’t see suggested tags in the screenshots above). While Microsoft didn’t say this, I think Microsoft is now focused on doing more of the kind of automatic tagging introduced for the Shifts app.

As evidence of the potential shift in focus, a new tag control is in Teams settings (Figure 3). When on (the default), Teams “automatically assign tags to people who are on-shift in real time. These tags match a user’s schedule and group name in Shifts. Notifications are only sent to those people who are on-shift at the time the tag is used in a chat or channel post.”

Good and Bad

Change is often a mixture of good and bad. I like the new ability to tag members in private and shared channels. I regret the deprecation of suggested tabs, and I’m curious about how automatic tags work in practice. Such is life!

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