Add a Team calendar tab

We want a ‘Team Calendar’ tab to put on each Team ….. we want team members to make calendar invitations from the Team, not from their personal calendar… as it is part of the information of the team.

This should be built-in, and whilst it can be solved with SharePoint – it is tedious. I’ve written up my solution here: Do you make your team meetings easy to find?

Matt Wicks

UserVoice: Add a team calendar to Teams or allow a project team calendar to be added as a tab.

Help me find the highlight and font color

Dear Microsoft Teams Team,

Microsoft Teams suggestion – Help me find the highlight and font color

I expect no-one uses these 2 buttons regularly like they do in Outlook and Word. Therefore I think if you look at the current status of usage, these icons would not be used that much. If you were to change them to look just like Microsoft Word I’d bet the usage figures would go up.

Please consider using the same colour on the highlight and font colour icons

Figure: Good example – In Word, I am very used to seeing the yellow and the red
Figure: Bad example – In Teams, I think these 2 icons are unrecognizable !! The A looks like an underline

Help me know what resources a client has access to

Inside SSW, we have added a lot of clients into the Teams team. On the downside, you start seeing a lot of names you don’t know.

Suggestion: 
John is a client and a person I don’t really know. It took me a long time to know what he has access to here at SSW.

On this popup window it would be nice if you show something like this:

John has access to:

  • 1 team
  • 1 DevOps project
  • 2 invoices (via an extensibility point)
Figure: Suggestion – Add a 5th icon here “Activity”  (this would enable the user to learn more about what John has access to)
Figure: On this 3rd tab Activity, please add what John has access to

Advise when the contacted person is busy

When I message someone and don’t pay attention to their status (Busy, In a call, Presenting, etc.) I want the Teams Bot/App to reply with something like:

Adam Cogan is currently in a call and may not be notified of your message. If it is urgent, please click here to send the notification now.

This will be a useful feature so that we are made aware of the recipient’s status before we start pinging them continuously.

Slack has this already implemented with its DND (Do Not Disturb) feature. Link to example: Knock, knock: Introducing Do Not Disturb

Figure: Example image from Slack blog showing their DND feature

Navigation – Help me know where I am

I click a link (sadly an unreadable link):

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/file/946926A6-F818-4208-9CFE-0D74BBC96619?tenantId=ac2f7c34-b935-48e9-abdc-11e5d4fcb2b0&fileType=xlsx&objectUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fsswcom.sharepoint.com%2Fsites%2FBrisbaneRetreat2020%2FShared%20Documents%2FGeneral%2FBrisbane-%20Retreat-2020-Attendance.xlsx&baseUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fsswcom.sharepoint.com%2Fsites%2FBrisbaneRetreat2020&serviceName=teams&threadId=19:27c127ee866b495e9a42775b66be92b9@thread.skype&groupId=fb84bba4-1504-4c82-96e5-ab938868ad2b

And I go here.

Suggestions:

  1. Where am I? Can you please add a breadcrumb that takes me to the team that this file belongs to (see red arrow)
  2. The ‘Close’ button should be renamed to ‘Cancel’ because it takes you back to where you were eg. the last chat
Figure: The navigation is missing

Help me see our chat and call history together

Can Microsoft Teams show our calls in the chat window… like Skype does?

Of course, maybe it only annoys me… so if there is more logic to this usability, I love to understand.

Figure: Bad example – Teams does *not* show our calls in the chat


Figure: Good example – Skype nicely shows the calls in the chat


Help Chinese Android users know how to download Teams

In China, everything is hard and amazing. Chinese users on an iPhone have no trouble downloading Teams.
Android users, talk about plenty of pain if they go down the wrong route.

Basically, they find it hard to download. The Teams website, tells you to download it via the Google store which is bad advice in China (all Google services are blocked by the Great Firewall of China 🇨🇳).

Here is one example of a senior developer:

  • It took me about 4 hours to install Teams, more specifically to download it
  • I tried to install it via Google services first, but obviously, it failed.
  • Then I searched and downloaded 3 APK files from my PC, but all of them are too old.
  • Finally, I installed it from Mi store (aka Xiaomi store).

In summary:
In China, no you don’t need a get on a VPN to get Teams downloaded. For an Android user, you have 2 options to install. You can install it via the Mi store or AppChina. The Mi store is the best approach – Eden Liang (from SSW in Hangzhou) has recorded a video to help others. Here is the video: