In one of my recent blogs, I mulled over whether presence in Microsoft Teams means anything anymore, and whether the asynchronicity of Teams chat was feeding into a ‘fire-and-forget’ or ‘always on’ culture of work communication. BUT – buried in Microsoft’s announcements from this year’s Ignite, there’s a new little Teams feature which might help. 

Now in Teams chat you can right click on the send button and schedule the message to send at a different day and time: 

Much like the schedule send feature in Outlook, pick a timeslot and your chat message will send at that time. 

Could come in handy for: 

• That quick question you need to ask a colleague who works on a different time zone to you 
• The epiphany you had at 1am that you need to share with a group chat, but don’t want to make all their phones go ping in the middle of the night 
• Wanting to catch a colleague when their diary next looks free, without having to remember all by yourself

Although a great addition to Teams chat, for me this still places a lot of responsibility on the sender to be empathetic to others’ working patterns – and lets face it, sometimes on a crazy busy day things like empathy for others’ working patters can fly out the window. 

I wish this feature took one step further and included an option for making the scheduled send react to presence; ie – send when the person’s status is next showing ‘available’.

This has been requested in Microsoft’s feedback portal; I’ve upvoted it, and you can too here:  https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/b7fd2474-08f3-ec11-a81b-000d3a03dba2    

What do you think of the new feature? Do you think you would use it? What for? (Or why not?!) Let me know in the comments.