Microsoft Teams Launches Chat with Self Feature

15 Jun Microsoft Teams Launches Chat with Self Feature

Posted at 13:57h in Updates by adaQuest 0 Comments

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Users will now be able to chat with themselves. All the same chat functionality that works for chatting with others will work for the individual chatting with themselves. They will be able to start a chat with themselves by typing their full name in the To: field when creating a new chat.

Microsoft 365 offers a plethora of applications wanting to help users to stay organized, including Tasks in Teams, Planner, To Do, Outlook Tasks, Outlook calendar boards, Project, OneNote, and so on. Chatting with yourself takes self-organization to a different plane.

People have sent messages to themselves as aide memoires for many years using SMS, emails, and just about every other messaging platform (here’s how Slack delivers the same kind of capability). I usually send myself an email using Outlook mobile when the need arises. The idea behind the “chat with self” feature is based on user experience and practice. Microsoft believes that people will use chat with self to make notes, list things they must do, and so on, or maybe just let off some steam about the latest mistake by co-workers/management/anyone else in a one-way conversation.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 88066

When this will happen:

We will begin rolling out mid June and expect to complete by late June.

How this will affect your organization:

The user will now be able to send themselves messages the same way they would with anyone else.

Previously, the user wasn’t able to directly send themselves messages. There were workarounds, however, where a user could start a meeting with themselves and utilize the meeting chat as a self chat. Another workaround was if everyone in a group chat left, and the user was there alone. These will continue being part of the experience, but they are different from a chat with self.

A chat with self allows the user to type in their name in the To field when creating a new chat, and have a conversation with themselves. They can also access chatting with themselves from their people card.

What you need to do to prepare:

You may consider updating your training and documentation as appropriate.

Starting Chat with Self

To chat with themselves, a user starts a chat by entering their own name as the chat participant. Teams display a screen to recognize the special nature of the chat (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Teams chat with self is all about you

You can’t transform the special chat with self into a regular chat by adding more people to it, but you can create a Loop component in the chat and make it available by sharing the link to the loop file in OneDrive for Business to allow other people to open and interact with the component, which is what I did in with the Loop paragraph shown in Figure 2.