The next 11 things I would like to see in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams has been a great new addition to  the Office 365 family but there are still plenty of things that I would like to see added or improved.

1. I would like to see Improved Search

Have you tried searching for content in Wikis? Well so far it’s not been possible. Wikis are added as one of the default tabs in each channel, but still something as simple as searching fro content isn’t possible.

2. Accounts switching

If there is one thing that I don’t like in Teams then it is the current implementation of switching between tenants

First of all what is an account? isn’t that something username/password like? I’m actually switching between tenants. This switching is actually very annoying anyway. As a consultant I access multiple tenants every day and with  limited functionality within the browser and only the ability to make calls from the app, I tend to switch login quite often.

Then as I’m a member of the MVP Elite Microsoft Teams team ( there are only about 100 MVPs a member of this club), I’ve got yet another account that gives me access to the kitchen of Microsoft Teams.

3. Moving Guest access

Rather than guest access at the account level, it would be better to have all teams listed and those guest teams marked as Guest. This would avoid the whole switching between accounts.

4. Call Recording

I do quite a lot of presentations through teams and it would be nice if I could record these sessions. I know that I can use some obscure Windows feature to record my sessions but this should really move into Teams itself.

5. Alerts

There are a lot of alert options already available in Teams, but whenever I’ve been on leave and I try to go through all my alert to catch up, my alerts disappear in one go. It would be nice if these alert disappeared one by one, a bit like email in Outlook that is being read.

6. External access

Well, a lot has already been said about external access and teams. A lot of progress has been made but there is still a lot to do. I can’t wait for the next improvements in this.

7. Channel security

Currently teams have members and owners, but channel can only inherit these security levels from the team. Often it would be nice if you could have specific permissions set on channels.

8. Views on files

Even though I like SharePoint, it is a real pain having to switch to SharePoint whenever I want to do some of the unavailable operations on my documents.

9. Teams is no Office 365

Office 365 always has to following top bar with the App Launcher:

Why does Microsoft Team not have this bar?

So I can switch to Microsoft Teams but I can’t switch back

10. Apps announcements

Within the browser I get told every day that I can download an app:

And if I happen to miss that option there are more options in the main menu:

11. Email Alerts

Then the most annoying feature in Microsoft Teams that really needs to be address is the email alerts. When I receive an alert like this in my email on my Windows 10 mobile phone (Yes I still run Windows 10 Mobile and I love it!).

I can click on the link, My Teams app on my mobile opens and that is it. The actual conversation doesn’t get opened and for my external networks, I can’t switch to my external network on my phone. I can understand that the content of the message shouldn’t be in the email ( although plenty of cases where that would be ok, therefore this could become a configuration option), but at least let me access Microsoft Teams conversations either within the browser or within the app.

11b. Mentions in API

Currently it isn’t possible to create a conversation in Teams and include the team’s name or any person’s name as a mention (the @name construction). The API will simply send the @ sign followed by the name. It would be great if this was possible so that I can get my daily stand-up messages in my team generated rather than manually submitted.

This has now been implemented. See my post How to @mention someone in Microsoft Teams using Power Automate