Microsoft is working on an expansion to the tags feature in its online collaboration platform Teams, which allows users to @mention groups of people without targeting an entire channel.
As per a new entry in the company’s product roadmap, Microsoft will soon deliver a new set of APIs that introduce a level of automation to the application of tags to users.
“This set of APIs can be used to programmatically assign users tags in a team, making tag creation and maintenance faster and easier,” Microsoft explained.
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“Using these new APIs, developers can now: create tags in a team and assign users, get a list of tags in a team, update tags or delete tags.”
Although the new APIs are now in public preview, the upgrade is still technically under development. Assuming the project remains on schedule, the APIs should be rolled out in full by the end of June.
Microsoft Teams tags
With the pandemic prohibiting face-to-face interaction, workers are being bombarded with a greater number of notifications than ever, across both email and collaboration tools, computers and smartphones.
This storm of notifications is a significant tax on the attention, which can be particularly problematic for anyone that struggles to recover focus after an interruption.
The Microsoft Teams tag feature offers a partial solution to this problem, by allowing users to send messages to a specific group of people without either disturbing the rest of the channel, cluttering their client with a new group or @mentioning all intended recipients individually.
According to Microsoft, the new APIs will help developers streamline the allocation of tags to specific users. For example, if a new starter were to join a particular team, they would automatically be included under that team’s specific Microsoft Teams tag.
This will mean tags are always as up-to-date as possible and users can be certain their messages are reaching everyone that needs to see them.
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