Background
A few months ago I shared on social medias, that one feature in MS Teams that I was really looking forward to, is the Chat with yourself feature. Most other chat applications have it, but it was not a feature for MS Teams…until now! ๐
Recently, the new feature has become available for everyone and I discovered it by opening my MS Teams application one morning. Suddenly, I had a new pinned chat. It was a chat with myself ๐ And then the day had already started to be awesome ๐
The idea of personal chats are that you can take notes, share files, post quick messages for yourself to remember things. You can also use it to share information between devices. So if you have MS Teams on your phone and computer, then it is an easy way to transfer a picture from your phone to your computer, without having to find another way. The same can be with files and it works both ways ๐
But beyond that, then it seems like the chat with yourself is a subject that people either love or really don’t understand. I have made a few social media posts about it and every time, i get different opinions. There are people that are over enthusiastic, like me ๐ Really happy about the new feature and saying that they have been waiting a long time for it, while there are others that think it’s a nice feature, but not something they would use and then there is also a group who really can’t understand why someone would want to have a chat with themselves.
Everyone has an opinion on the matter and it is really exciting for me. I, personally, still use notebooks, because it is quick and easy + I always have it next to meat meetings. But there are limitations, like no search, no possibility to share, and all other things that are possible, if I would use OneNote or any other virtual tool.
But let me know, what do you think about the new feature? Will you use it?
But lets see what the new feature can ๐
What can you?
With the latest update, I automatically got a new pinned chat with myself. So that was easy-peasy nothing I needed to do to get it activated. It is just there are ready to use.
You get a chat like you have seen with other people, with tabs in the top, and message possibilities in the bottom. So you can send yourself gifs or emojis, or just send messages.
With the various messages you have written, you have the possibility to react to them and also look for more possibilities. The more possibilities part is where things get interesting:
Like with any other chat, you get the possibility to reply, edit or delete the message. I see the delete and edit functions to be very straightforward in this case, but how often do you really reply to your own messages?
One use case for reply that I am planning to use, is if you post notes as questions. Then you can use the reply function, to answer the question at a later point and in that way bind the question and answer together.
Pin the message is another functionality that I see great value in. I don’t use it that much in other chats, but specifically this chat, it is nice to be able to pin a specific message. This can be a morning greeting, to start things off well ๐ Or a specific task or note that needs to be remembered. In other cases, it can also be some links that you quickly want to find. I was trying to see if it is possible to pin multiple messages, but that doesn’t seem to be possible ๐ I guess it is also good, to remove the possibility that you just end up pinning all your messages and get no value out of it ๐
There are though, some functionality that isn’t available for personal chat and that I will look into now.
What can’t you?
When comparing the personal chat with any other chat, you can notice that there are a few things missing:
No possibility to add apps
You don’t have the possibility to connect various apps to you chat, that are available for other chats. That’s a bit of a pity, as I would like to add whiteboard or a Power BI report to it. Making it really an overview for myself.
No delivery options
So with normal chat you have a small exclamation mark under the message box. When you click on it, you get 3 options: Standard, Important and Urgent. Those possibilities are a quick way of indication the type of the message you are sending. Especially the urgent one that will notify the receiver every 2 min for 20 min after the message was sent.
That exclamation mark, you don’t get for personal messages and to be fair, I don’t see much use for the notification part, but the important is pretty good to have. Luckily, it is not gone and you can classify your messages as important, but withย only one more more click ๐ย guide in the video below.
Disabled more actions to edit a message
On regular chats you have the possibility to add more actions to the message. Actions such as start a Power Automate flow, create a task or add to Dynamics 365. This option is disabled for personal messages. And that is a real bummer in my opinion. It would be really great to be able to automatee the messages you create in there. Add them to MS To Do or another task list. Send out an email to someone just from the message, post to social medias, the options are endless. But unfortunately that is not the option. Hopefully it will come in the future!
Share to Outlook giving an error
So, the only option that is very confusing, is the fact that you have the possibility to click on the edit option called Share to Outlook. But what happens is, that it opens a new window and then gives an error. Saying that Teams is having a problem reaching the app. You also get a button underneath, that says Retry. But, no matter how many times you press that, it won’t succeed.
I am very lucky to be connected with many amazing people and Yannick Reekmans managed to reach out to the team to hear that this feature is actually not supposed to work… And this is where the confusion comes in ๐
Maybe, it would make sense to deactivate the possibility or remove it from the options? I hope it is just a bug, that the button is active and it will soon be removed. But, just in case, anyone else is wondering, then this feature is not working by design ๐
But would anyone like this feature? Would you want to send your message as an email? Do you have a use case on it, that you would like to share? Then I would really like to hear from it ๐ Maybe we can even see if it makes sense to enable that feature in the future.
Summary
So this is my take on the new MS Teams personal chat or chat with yourself feature. I have already started using it for my daily plans and quick: “Vivian, make sure you remember this!” kind of notes ๐
For more information about the feature, you can read: