How many time have I seen people want to @mention someone in Microsoft Teams using Power Automate? Many Time!
Why to mention someone in Microsoft Teams
Ok, this is such a common scenario where you want to use Microsoft Teams to alert a person while your flow is running.
Quite a lot of consultancies for example organise stand-ups in Teams by sending a daily post to a team. Being able to alert people that the daily post is there can be quite important.
Or for example a long running flow does all sorts of things and then some people need to be alerted that the process is complete or that it has failed.
Running a flow to mention someone in Microsoft Teams
Today I noticed the Get @mention token for a user action. Why would this action exist if you can’t mention a person?
The development steps
Well, it is as simple as selecting the action Get @mention token for a user and then select the user that you want to mention.
Then use the Pots a message(V3) to post the action and use @mention from the dynamic content.
And that is it!
Advanced mode
It’s time for the bonus. Did you notice in the above screenshot the advanced mode option on the Get @mention token for a user action? The little icon with the two arrows.
In advanced mode you can supply an email address for a user. I tried to see if I could put extra logic in their but that doesn’t seem to be possible yet.
This has been such a missing feature for so long that this is a great additional action to the Microsoft Teams connector in Power Automate. One of my posts from 2018 already mentioned the missing @mention feature but now it is there.
Pieter Veenstra
Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com
Thanks! I tried to do this a while ago and either it wasn’t available yet or I just missed it, but this is helpful.
Last week I was getting close to make this work through a MS Graph call, but i got stuck on the permission for Power Automate. From Graph explorer however it then already worked.
So I’m assuming that this is using that API now. I’m quite sure that this has been introduced very recently.
I was about to ask how to @mention someone in Microsoft Teams using Power Automate 🙂
That’s exactly what I was looking for, worked like a charm.
Thanks a lot.
Xavier Donat
Thanks a lot, this is very helpful. Have you found a way how to @mention a channel or even a team?
Hi Hannah, unfortunately not
This works for me but the @mention doesn’t result in a notification in activity feed. Is anyone else seeing this?
Hi Ben,
What do you notification settings look like? could it be that the notification is just delayed? Or does it work properly when you @Mention someone manually within the team app?
Hi, sadly I can not see or select any user/member. What do I have to do to select specific user? Do you have any idea? 🙂
Kind regards!
Hi Lennart,
Sorry for the delay in responding. Your comment ended up in spam.
Can you create a comment in Teams and then run a flow that collects that specific post from Teams. Then have a look in flow what the @mention for that user looks like and try to replicate that.
I am not able to select a user either. I made a comment but it still doesn’t select the user. Are you saying I have to create a different flow? So confused. It sounded pretty easy but isn’t.
Hi Lynette,
Sorry for the delayed response. Your comment appeared in spam.
Please feel free to start a chat and we can discuss to make this work for you.
Hi Pieter,
Can I also tag an entire Team, so everyone will be notified?
Hi Harm Jan,
That option doesn’t exist within Power Automate yet.
Very helpful. This works great for internal emails. It does not work for external guests in the Team, though, unless there is a workaround for that. Also wish i could @mention Teams, Channels and Tags!
Hi Mary Lynn,
You can mention guest users, however you will have to supply the user id of the guest in the get @mention token.
For Teams, Channels and Tags you are right.
I have the same experience Mary Lynn had above. I can get this to work pretty easily for internal users, but it doesn’t work at all for guest users. It tells me “Resource does not exist or one of its queried reference-property objects are not present.” Is there a undocumented ‘secret handshake’ you found to make that work?
Hi Eric, when you use the user id of the guest user (a guid) it will work.
How can I find the user id of a member of the team/channel
You will have to use the get @mention token action using their email address. You cannot do this for channels or teams.
Interesting. Making my first hack of power automate, and this is what I need, but I can’t find the “double arrow” symbol anywhere. Am I missing something obvious?
Hi Niels, can you enabled the experimental features. You find this switch in the settings in Power Automate.
Thanks Pieter, That gives me two out of three buttons, but not the double arrow one. I think I need some time to see what can be done here.
Hi Niels,
I just tested it out and I’m not getting the advanced mode either anymore.
I was successful using directly a valid email address in the User field of the Get token action.
Is it possible to @ mention more than one user when posting a message?
Hi Nick,
Yes you can, just use multiple get @mention token actions and then reference them in the post.