How to set Notifications based on your work style
After you get your Teams organized, another area that can help is to properly set your notifications. Just like you would on your personal smart phone, you can alter how Teams notifies you for different actions or activities. It is important to set them to the level that works best for you.
In the top right-hand corner of your Teams Client or on the web, click on your Picture or Initials, click settings, and navigate to the Notification section. It should look like this;
As you can see there are a ton of settings here, if they were all on or all off, I don’t think any of us would be happy. Therefore, I want to call out a few options here to make your life a little better when it comes to too much noise that is overwhelming. Also, let’s make sure you are not missing important things.
Sounds, the first and most important option is right at the top, Notification Sounds, this is an all or nothing setting, basically it means; do you want Teams to chime or make a noise when you get a notification or just be a visual notification. I have mine turned off, but the choice is yours.
After sounds, there is an important section about emails, I recommend to users who are just getting started with Teams to enable emails for Missed activities because you might not be used to checking Teams on a regular basis, but if you get prompted by an email that will remind you that you might be missing something important. After you get more accustomed to checking Teams you can lower the frequency in which you get these emails and eventually turn them off. I have Teams open all day every day, so I don’t need an email to remind me, so I have mine off. Also, if you want a summary email of what happened in Teams each day you can toggle on/off the digest Email.
Next options is updating your notifications for different types of actions, some actions could be more important to you, like an @mention to me is very important, that means someone is calling me out by name, so I want that type of action to very predominate in my notifications, but I don’t really need to know when someone liked a comment I posted. I am happy you liked it, but I don’t need a big alert validating me each time someone likes my stuff, lol!
In this section you will notice are in the drop downs, there are typically 3 options;
- Banner and feed
- Only show in feed
- Off
But what do these mean?
- A Banner is a bubble, the little red circles, they will show up when you turn them on for an activity. A small number will be displayed if there are multiple items. This is just like what you would see on your smart phone when you missed a text message.
- The Feed is when something is in the conversation tab of a Team. If you choose "only show in feed" then you will not get a badge but the Team or Channel will bold indicating there is activity in the Feed that you might want to go and look at.
- Off is just that, there is no visual indication for this item.
Last you want to update your notification on mobile device, Teams is supported on both Android and iOS, navigate to your notification settings and update them based on how you want to be notified by Teams on mobile. You can make these different than on desktop.