Wednesday 7 June 2017

Microsoft Teams Update 31st May 2017

Hello readers, hope you're well.  A quick post today.  I noticed another release note in Teams dated 31st May.  

You can see what's new in Teams in the T-Bot chat in the Release Notes tab.  The below is directly from the release notes.  I have added a few comments here and there in Blue so you know it's me speaking.


Invite people to Teams via chat: When you're in a group chat that includes people who aren't on Teams yet, sending them a message will automatically notify them via email that they've got a message waiting for them in Teams. That email will also include an invitation to sign up for Teams and join the party.

This one is a great way to get more adoption for Teams in your organization.  The only real comment I have is that it would be good to get a notification when you add someone to a chat and that they don't have Teams.  Perhaps just a notice to say that the user hasn't used Teams before and that they will get the email inviting them to use Teams.  This is just to manage your own expectations about the liklihood of a response.  An email invite to use something they've never seen/used/heard of before could just go unnoticed.  I would also say that if the message is important and you know they aren't in Teams yet, you can think of another way to communicate with them in this instance.

Manage app behavior on startup: In the next few days, if you head over to your app Settings (just click your profile picture) and select Application, you'll find that you have three new settings around launching and closing Microsoft Teams. Now, you can turn on the following behaviors:

  • Make Microsoft Teams launch automatically when you start your machine.
  • Opt to launch Teams automatically, but have it run quietly in the background.
  • Enable Teams to keep running even when you close your window.


Unless you specify otherwise, Teams will start up in the foreground of your machine by default.

This one is definitely live now in my client.  My app has started automatically at start-up since I installed it.  But now I have the option not to start it up within the app.

Auto start is pretty straightforward and self explanetory.  

Open in the background just means that Teams doesn't go into focus when it opens.  If you have a busy Teams team, I would say that you would want focus at startup so you can see the activity straight away.  By contrast, if Teams isn't something you're in all the time, you might want to tick this.  

The third option simply changes the behavior of the close "X" button.  Rather than exiting the application it simply minimises to the system tray.  To open the app again, just click on the system tray icon.  Right click also gives you a few options including open.

That's it for now.

As always, I thank you for reading.

If this or any other post has been useful to you please take a moment to share.  Comments are welcome.