Suggestion: Teams – Auto remove people from the chat at the end of a call


I am not sure if this is an edge case…. I’d love to know how others work.

On some calls – for example a managers meeting – you want to temporarily add in someone just for a quick question. You don’t want them to remain after the call. It is kind of a security or privacy issue if you don’t remove them.

So I find it really annoying when I forgot to remove them after the call and they probably find it annoying when they get our messages after the call.  So I would prefer not to have to remove the person manually.

Suggestion – next to “Add people”, I think it would be really cool to add a person via an option “Add people (temporarily)”.

Cool suggestion?

Figure: Add new option “Add people (temporarily)”

Microsoft Teams Approvals App – Help me allow users to be in multiple approver groups

Video: Rick Su explains the issue (2 min)

The Approvals app is great for simple scenarios like purchase approvals and event attendance approvals.

There is a problem with more complex approvals. Say you need approvals from 2 out of 5 designated people, then validation stops this from being done.

The current validation does not allow the same person to be in multiple approver groups. This validation should be removed.

Figure: ❌ It is a problem that the same individual user cannot be assigned to multiple approver groups.

There are other solutions that allow this such as www.KissFlow.com and www.integrify.com

Suggestion:

The Microsoft Teams Approvals App should allow the same individual user to appear in multiple approver groups.  

This modification would give the flexibility to allow more complex approval scenarios.

Microsoft Teams Approval App – Allow me to edit approvals

At SSW we are rolling out the use of the Approvals App with Teams to get requests approved through the organization.  I love how easy it is to create templates and use them to submit requests.  Previously we were using emails to manage these approvals, so another benefit is a reduction of noise across our collective inboxes.

Once an approval is submitted there is no way to alter the data.  While this makes sense for requests that have been approved, it would be great if we could edit requested approvals prior to being approved.  Currently, the only way we can do this is submit another request which means manually entering all information again which takes time. 

Figure: Able to edit SMS messages after being sent on an iPhone.  Image from Edited iMessages in iOS 16 Now Display Original Text, Undo Send Limited to Two Minutes – MacRumors

Workaround:

  1. Send another request with the updated information.
    • ❌ This can be time consuming if multiple edits need to be made
    • ❌ Copying information to another request can be error prone
    • ❌ Approval system gets polluted with duplicate requests

Suggestion:

  1. Add the ability to edit an approval request prior to it being approved.
  2. This would include changing the approver (if the template allowed the user to select approvers)
Figure: Lack of an option to edit an approval request
Figure: Only able to edit approvers during request creation
Figure: Viewing details of an approval request after it’s sent

Microsoft Teams Approval App – Allow me to easily find important approvals

Every company has the need for requests to be approved.  We’ve found that the Microsoft Teams Approval App works well, but only in simple cases.  It is easy to create templates and use them to submit requests. 

When companies switch from emails to a centralized structured approval, processes improve, and emails are reduced.

Senior Management are often responsible for approving most requests and as such can have a large backlog of requests to approve.  In order to help approvers action the most important requests I would like to see the following enhancements:

  1. Allow Priority to be set in Custom Approval Templates – ideally the priority level would be set in the Custom Approval Template, and not able to be changed by the user making the request.
  2. The ‘Request title’ field is not enough.  We need another column called ‘Approval Template Type’.
  3. We can sort on the column titles, but we need the ability to filter by Priority and Approval Template Name
Figure 1: Approval Hub – Can see Priority and Title, but not Request Type
Figure 2: Not able to filter by Priority and/or Request Type
Figure 3: We are able to configure priority for basic requests, but NOT able to do this for Custom Request Templates.  We need access to this field in Custom Request Templates.
Figure 4: Why are there only two priorities?  We would like to have 3 levels (for example, similar to how Outlook works (see below))
Figure 5: In Outlook we have 3 priorities.  For consistency, we would like 3 priorities in the Teams Approval App also.

Microsoft Teams – Help me forward chat history

I work in the China office, and we keep reverting to WeChat because it offers this feature which is super useful. It is missing from Teams.

I want to be able to forward a group of messages in my private chat with someone else not in the chat. This often happens when a problem comes up in the discussion and I realized I have already discussed a similar issue. Therefore, I want to share a section of my chat history to them quickly.

❌ My current workarounds:
Option 1: Copy + paste the messages one by one to the other chat.
Option 2: Take a long screenshot of the chat history and share the image.

✅ Suggestion:
Allow people to cherry-pick messages in their chat and forward them in a bundle.

❌ Figure: I want to forward just the section in the red box to someone else (but I don’t want to share irrelevant information about my annual review)
✅ Figure: WeChat lets me combine and forward selected messages

Teams – ‘Hide’ is in the wrong spot

Little Suggestion:

We have a new feature “Delete” a chat. I’d love to know if people will use it.

I’m not sure I will use it as I like history in chats, but I regularly use ‘Hide” to remove a chat conversation (I am always aiming for a 0 inbox and a 0 chat list).

On the right click menu, notice the last 2 are about getting rid of a chat…. And so is “Hide” chat. Therefore it is in the wrong place.

Please can you move “Hide” with the bottom 2 menu items. Those 3 are related.

Figure: Teams’ Delete Chat Feature

Help me quickly add the likely members of a new chat group

I have another fantastic idea 😊

We all love Microsoft Teams and I think this UI looks like it is about to be clever, but it is not.

When starting a new chat… 
If I pick 1 person… please attempt to guess the 2nd person I will add to the chat.
People are often related and I know it would be a nice for all Microsoft Teams users if the people picker showed the like people that I will chat with together. 

Today, it doesn’t matter who I pick first in the chat, the search always shows the same people.

Figure: I type ‘Gert’ it pops open people, if I pick ‘Bob’ it pops open the *same* people!

Suggestion

Please pick who I will probably pick next … it should change the people based on who I am adding.

More info:
Delve tells me who I talk to a bit, that would be ok.
But when you talk to a manager, you probably are going to pick another manager.
When I talk to an Azure DevOps engineer, I am probably going to pick another Azure engineer (not a React developer).

Help me find the advanced location to manage access

Hey Teams / SharePoint Team Product Owner,

I don’t think this UI is clear to users. I just did a quick poll and people that use this UI did not know about the 3 dots “…” (see red arrow)

Please change to a 3rd button that says “Manage” or “Manage Access” 

Figure: Bad UX – Who clicks these 3 dots?

It then brings open this …

Figure: Use the Share | Shared with | Manage access… – then users can get the correct link to give users

Teams Search – Help me find documents I have permissions to (BUG)

Teams search is super important, and I hope this one is on Microsoft’s backlog.

I expect Teams search and SharePoint search to have consistent results. Do others?

Not finding stuff you have permissions too is super frustrating. So this one has always confused me…. Do you consider it a bug?

Watch this one:

Figure: Teams and SharePoint Search Bug with Jean Thirion – YouTube (5 mins)

I think Jean did a great explanation of the permissions problem.


More info

This is really weird behaviour – fire up Fiddler and you can see what Teams is doing in the background. 

Turns out that when you search in Teams before it shows you what you have access to, it weirdly adds a refining query to only show documents from a list of every group you are a member of… 

Figure: This string of group id’s is about 75 items long, and I believe it is made up of every Team I am a member of… I’d like to turn this off
Figure: Query yields 1 result

When I remove that refining query, it works as expected:

Figure: In Fiddler when you edit the request and remove the group id refining query …it yielded 21 results

So I would say this appears to be a deliberate decision rather than a bug, though I think it is important to be able to turn it off if you want to find stuff using Team’s search 😂

In fact I would turn it off by default, so it is consistent with SharePoint Search

Allow me to open in desktop app

When creating a new document directly in Microsoft Teams, Teams always opens the web version of the Office app that you are asking for (e.g. Word).

Please add a checkbox for Teams for open in Desktop App instead.

Figure: Open in Desktop App checkbox here

Note: It even ignores the setting in Teams to always open in the Desktop app:

Figure: Teams ignores its own setting “Open in Desktop App” when creating a new file