There’s SO MUCH going on in Microsoft Teams as a product, how do you even start to talk about it?! In this blog series I’m going to attempt to work my way through the letters of the alphabet, talking about as many features as I can think of in turn.

If you’re new to Teams, hopefully this helps you find your way around. If you’re not new to Teams, maybe you’ll still get some new ideas. Here we go…

A is for…Activity Feed

This is the thing on the left-hand side that notifies you about all the things happening in Teams:

If you’ve got all notifications turned on, it will tell you about:

• When people react to your messages
• Missed calls
• When you’ve been @mentioned in a chat or channel
• When a channel you’re part of has been @mentioned

The list goes on… and on!!!

If you’re thinking “HELP! It’s too noisy! How do I turn Teams notifications off?” an easy fix is to turn on the ‘unread only’ toggle at the top of the feed:

Then any activity that you’ve ‘read’ (ie clicked on) will disappear from view.

Still too noisy? You can use the settings cog at the top of the feed to control exactly what you see in the feed:

Here you can edit at a super granular level all the things you want to be notified about (or not) in your feed, as well as your banner notifications (the little box that pops up at the bottom of the screen. Sidenote: that used to be called a ‘toast’ – which I preferred because I love toast):

For example, if you click ‘edit’ next to Chat, you can decide what shows up in your activity feed from all chat messages, and even turn off notifications completely if you find that they are clogging up your feed. If you don’t need to see every thumbs-up, turn them off!  

As a millennial I’m a praise-lover so I keep all my reaction notifications turned on, but if you find it irritating getting notified of every single thing, you have the power to change this!

It takes a little bit of time and a little bit of thought to go through these settings, but I think it’s worth it to get the notifications that you really care about in the places where it works for you to receive them.

Next week will be part 2 of ‘A is for…’ looking at Apps in Microsoft Teams.

What’s your activity feed like? Super-busy or super-bare? Let me know!