@ another Team or Individual while staying in your Team Channel Conversation
Use case:
- a threaded conversation starts within a single team but reaches a point where conversation would benefit from participation expanding beyond this team's members. The whole reason email chains expand as a conversation unfolds.
Note, the additional participants have no reason to be added to this Team's membership...just this one conversation.
-e.g. a team wants input from a person/team that is not a member of their team. It would be more efficient not to step outside of the thread to restart an active conversation.
Approach:
- allow adding another Team or individual to a single threaded conversation while trapping all materials as done now within a threaded conversation in a Team Channel.
- if @ an individual, then for that individual start up a group chat that contains the entire conversation from the non-member's perspective while the Team stay in their normal channel.
- if @ another team, then show the entire threaded conversation added to the applicable channel within the new Team while also remaining visible within the original Team's Channel.
- content (files, email...) added to that specific threaded conversation is available to all participating teams and individuals.
- Thread marked/highlighted to make it obvious non-members are participating in this specific threaded conversation. Also, make it easy to quickly see who they are.
- Team level settings to allow or restrict the inclusion of non-members in any conversations
Benefits:
- Reduce email chains within an organization. We have been using Teams for a couple months. As soon as someone outside the team needs to be involved, our people jump out of Team to Outlook to create an email instead. Recipients include the Team (Office Group) and additional participants. That conversation is lost to Teams...or is additional work to capture back into teams. Also, Team members feel like they have too many tools to watch for communication. Teams has the potential to reduce all of this noise.
- Reduce noise. This approach could also reduce noise that occurs when more people keep getting added to a team when they only need to be occasionally added to a conversation.
- Increase MS Teams adoption. Make it easy to show slow adopters why they don't need email as much...especially internally.
Vince Connelly
shared this idea
2 comments
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Trevor
commented
Extend this to voice comments. I wanted to add a specialist for one meeting and could not without adding him to the team. That team is sensitive so needed to add him without giving access to other files or conversations.
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Vince Connelly
commented
If I could edit the above idea...
Title: @Mention nonmember or another team
Help kill off email for internal conversations, please.
Right now, when a conversation expands to a nonmember, our users are leaving Teams for Outlook to have a conversation...thus the old email chain. The same old challenges then exist...cluttered inbox, did you reply to the latest message, did you read the entire chain because there were forks because not everyone replied to the latest message, and the knowledge is less discoverable in the future.- if @ an individual, then for that individual start up a group chat that contains the entire conversation from the nonmember's perspective while the Team stay in their normal channel.
- if @ another team, then show the entire threaded conversation added to the applicable channel within the new Team while also remaining visible within the original Team's Channel.
- content (files, email...) added to that specific threaded conversation is available to all participating teams and individuals.
- Thread marked/highlighted to make it obvious non-members are participating in this specific threaded conversation. Also, make it easy to quickly see who they are.
- Setting at two levels - Organization wide by IT and Team level by the Team "owner".