M365 Cafe

The M365 Café hosted by the M365 core team of the Commission is the perfect place to learn new tips and tricks about M365. Make sure to enrol for the upcoming session on 2 March about collaborating on documents using Teams.

Tag, you’re it!

One of the great features of Teams is tagging. When you write a direct message to a colleague or in a group chat, you can tag a person so that they receive a notification. This is useful when you would like this person or group of people to react or respond to your message. The same applies when you are writing a channel post – you can tag individual colleagues or the entire group if you wish.

Mirna SKUHAN from PMO COMM kindly offered to participate in this small how-to guide.

To tag a person type ‘@’ followed by the persons name or surname. A list will appear above the name where you can choose the person you wish to tag.

However, Teams automatically types the text with the format ‘SURNAME First name (DG)’. This is how it appears:

If you want to just have the first name of the person appear, all you need to do is click the end of the surname and delete it. Then do the same for the (DG) part. You will be left with the first name of the person highlighted in purple, which means you have successfully tagged them! It will look like this:

If you would like to tag an entire Teams group or channel, all you need to do is type ‘@GRP’ or ‘@(channel name)’ and the group or channel name should appear. This is particularly useful when you need to notify a large group of colleagues with your message.

Teams calendar

In a recent update, the MS Teams application has now been synchronised with your Outlook calendar. This means you can organise and manage meetings directly in Teams!

To access this feature, click the ‘calendar’ icon on the left-side bar:

Here you will see an overview of your meetings for the week. To organise a new meeting, click ‘new meeting’ in the top right corner:

Next, the page that appears looks similar to ‘new meeting’ option in Outlook. You simply add the meeting title, attendees, choose the date, time, occurrence, the channel (if necessary), the location, and the description. Once you click ‘save’, the meeting will appear in your Teams and Outlook calendars.