You can now tag specific user groups in Teams

If you are an enterprise that uses Teams to collaborate in the workplace, the tool boasts a host of new features to help your employees work and communicate more efficiently.

In a recent post Microsoft announced changes that streamline collaborations on Outlook emails within Teams. The updates also touch on how supervisors or superiors can use @ mentions to address specific users in their organization.

Tagging particular user groups

Even before the latest Teams updates, you could @ mention anyone within the platform to get their attention. You could also target all members of a team by using the @team tag.

But the tag is limiting in that it does not let you address a specific user group within your team. So you end up drawing the attention of people who should be focusing on other tasks or responsibilities in the office.

Now, Teams lets team owners set up tags for specific user groups or roles, allowing them to send targeted messages. This enhancement makes sense because team members may have different responsibilities, and some critical communication may only be relevant to certain personnel.

Targeted communication allows team members to message everyone assigned to a specific tag at the same time; simply @mention the tag name in a post. Using tags, team owners can organize users based on a common attribute, like a role, project, or location.

For example, you can @ mention and only target neurosurgeons in a team that also includes cardiologists, gastroenterologists, and dermatologists.

Share to Teams in Outlook

The news of Teams-Outlook email integrations does not come as a surprise since Microsoft had hinted about it before. It just so happens that reading, responding to, or collaborating on official email conversations are still a vital part of everyday workflows or tasks in modern workspaces, including digital ones like Teams.

Say, you have a prospective customer communicating to you via Outlook. But you are managing the sales process, including working with sales reps, in Teams.

With the new Share to Teams feature in Outlook, you can move an entire email conversation with the prospect to Teams. The reverse process is also possible within Teams.

According to recent rumors, Microsoft is working on a new Outlook feature, Spaces. The tool is meant to help organizations manage project elements like emails, contacts, to-do lists, and OneDrive files. The ability to export Teams conversations to Outlook will certainly make Spaces more powerful.