Friday, March 6, 2020

Microsoft Teams Suggested and Trending Notifications and How They Can Cause Confusion




New Suggested and Trending Notifications in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft has started to sneak in a feature into Teams that gives notifications for trending and suggested threads throughout your various Teams you are a member of. These are notifications to help you get more involved and not miss out on content in your Teams designed to help you reduce notification settings and keep you in the loop but it seemingly is causing more confusion than it is helping users with their Teams and notification noise.

Why Are Notifications Showing for Channels That Are Set Off?

There are many Tech Community posts and mumbling about that users are getting confused because they are receiving notifications in their activity feed despite them setting these channels notifications to "off".

On close inspection, you will notice that these notifications have new icon's next to them to let you know what the source of the notification is. Instead of the usual icons for reply, mention etc. you will have the following new icon's for Suggested and Trending notifications in the feed. 

These types of notifications do not follow the same rules as your channel notification settings and can make it seem that your notification settings are not working even thou they are for the normal notification types, but these new notification types override your settings. 


How can I disable these? 

Luckily Microsoft has provided ways of disabling these notification if you do not want them. Below you can find out how you can disable this for yourself. Or how the tenant admin can disable these for everyone with the click of a mouse. 

Per User: 

Each user has the ability to disable the suggested and trending notifications in their notification settings. In the settings window on the notifications tab, you can find trending and suggested as shown and set how you wish to be notified of these actions. **If you do not have these they have not been pushed to your tenant**






Org-Wide: 

Your tenant admins have the option to disable this for all users by disabling the following feature in Org Wide Settings > Team Settings > Notification and Feeds section, You have an option to disable Suggested feeds which should include Trending and Suggest notification types. This should disable it for your entire Org. 



Hopefully this will help you when this feature lands and your users are confused to why they are getting notifications for posts they shouldn't be getting them for. This feature can help with setting up less notifications but stay up on trending topics, however most users are used to being in control of what they want and don't want to see. The good news is Microsoft has given us a choice in this matter and not forced the notifications on us, so good job Microsoft for that, I just wish it was a bit more obvious than an icon to the users why they are getting these seemingly random notifications in their feeds.  

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