Allow Webhooks Extensions to @mention individuals and channels
The JSON payload used for formatting MS Teams notifications via a Webhooks Extension should allow @mentions to be constructed.
Similar to how a bot can construct a mention in it's response via <at>@General</at>.
Without this functionality, there's no way for members of a channel to be notified by the Webhooks Extension without having to first follow the channel.
In most real world scenarios, following a channel will not suffice — leading to spam and distractions for the team.
For many, the absence of this capability is preventing the transition from Slack to Teams.
Use Case 1:
A dev team needs to be notified in Teams when bugs or help desk tickets are entered into a third party system. However they do not want to be notified of every message, question, or interaction that occurs within this channel (i.e. following a channel).
Use Case 2:
A department wants to use Teams for handling weekly status reports. Using a webhook extension (scheduled via Logic Apps) to ask — "What did you do this week?"
All members of the department need to be reminded via a notification that it's time to respond with their weekly status, but shouldn't be subjected to spam as each team member responds or if managers/PMs respond and ask questions (as they would if they followed the channel).

21 comments
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Anonymous commented
This is a must have
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Josh commented
There is a small hack to this request that I have working for my staff. I have a small team of 4 Sr. Engineers. I have created a private channel for each of them and configured the webhook connector for each of their channels. In Project Automation within Jira I have created a If/Else conditional job that based on issue.assignment will send the message to Teams and to their unique channel. Which, as long as they have their notifications configured correctly, notifies them. It takes a bit of time for the initial setup but definitely works great... and better than waiting for MS to release the DM option.
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Anonymous commented
I am now using slack because this feature is missing..
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Tom Niessink commented
They finally added this https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17153099-webhook-needs-to-support-forced-notification-a-la to their backlog at the beginning of this month.
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Anonymous commented
Needed.
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Dany Aubut commented
This can definitely make a difference in our teams implementation
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Eóin Kavanagh commented
Wow, probably a simple implementation.
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Tom commented
The lack of this feature made us migrate from Teams to Slack
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Guillaume L. commented
The Azure DevOps connector is pretty much useless to notify for failed builds compared to the Slack one because it does not @mention the user that triggered the build (so no notifications). Pretty ironic when you consider that microsoft owns the whole stack in this case.
I wonder if it is blocked by this issue... -
Jason Brodie commented
Sad this isn't a thing ..
If you want people to come to your platform, give them a reason. -
Daniel Astillero commented
It's mind boggling that this isn't possible to this date.
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Dorian Jolivald commented
To anyone who comes this way, this request https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17153099-webhook-needs-to-support-forced-notification-a-la has more votes and is "Under Review" (for more than a year though).
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Kenny Sperling commented
NEED THIS!
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Alexander Tarasenko commented
This is a MUST feature for our team. This is a no brainer for this type of app. What is the point of creating an automatic message that will be lost in the shuffle if we cannot specify a person or a group that should look at the message?!
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Anonymous commented
I need this for. We are attempting to transition from Slack and ability to use it to alert a channel is a show stopper.
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Anonymous commented
Vote for this
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Alexander Yavorskiy commented
Switching from HipChat and shocked it is not supported for such a sophisticated framework. Added my vote.
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Chau Nguyen commented
Would this apply to the Microsoft Teams Graph API as well?
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John Stephenson commented
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Yves Rausch commented
Totally agree, I wanted to integrate teams in case 1 but can't now as mention someone do not work.