This morning I noticed that the feature ” Priority notifications” had appeared in my tenants! It’s actually called “Urgent messages” in the Teams UI! In the messaging policy it says priority notifications!
Read more about this feature here:
new-capabilities-in-microsoft-365
As above links mentions, this feature will be restricted in the actual numbers of urgent messages that users can send, based on licence type! This starts in January 1st 2020, but for now everyone can go bananas!
When you click the exclamation icon in a private chat or a group chat, you get the options to choose the old “Important” message type, which does nothing really except from mark the message with red color and says “important”
As you can see there’s now the “Urgent” option which will notify the user every 2 minutes for 20 minutes, if the person don’t read the message!
“This feature is not available for Channel conversations”
When a message is received, there’s a bell that makes it clear this is (should be) something important!
Also, an email will be sent directly to the users email address!
If you have DnD (Do not disturb) set to enabled this will get overrun by the urgent message also! The disclaimer for DnD has been updated:
You can control who can use this feature in the messaging policy. For more information about this see this blogpost:
Summary:
This is a feature that was developed initially for the healthcare sector, and that makes sense! If Microsoft Teams is used for communication in a hospital for example, there ought to be an option to make sure important messages are read! There are several other scenarios this feature can be helpful or important too, but I fear it will be used when it’s not really needed ending up annoying users instead! The future will see! I for sure made some people annoyed already 😂
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