Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Graph, 13 Jul 2021

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From YouTube: Getting started with Microsoft Graph Tag API for managing Microsoft Teams tagging

Description

In this 7-minute admin/developer-focused demo, Annie Colonna’s presentation focuses on people centric tags used in Teams to categorize, to @mention, and to start a chat. Teams makes it nearly effortless to create, manage and use tags to connect people and groups. New Beta APIs, available the week of June 28th, address many tag management challenges – permissions, membership updates, tapping data that exists outside the immediate group. Glimpse at plans for evolving this capability. This PnP Community demo is taken from the General Microsoft 365 Development Special Interest Group (SIG) - Bi-weekly sync call recorded on June 24, 2021.

Demo Presenter: Annie Colonna (Microsoft) | @AnnieColonna

Supporting materials:
• Documentation - teamworkTag resource type | https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teamworktag?view=graph-rest-beta
• Teams Support - Using tags in Teams | https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/using-tags-in-teams-667bd56f-32b8-4118-9a0b-56807c96d91e

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp-videos

A

With the tags that we're talking about are uh people-centric tags and the goal of those tags, I just want to give a little bit of background before we go ahead and jump into the apis. The the goal of tags is to have you quickly reach a group of people within a team. So what it'll? Let you do is kind of categorize people based on the organizational knowledge that you have, and that could be something like a a role which is something that's really popular with our industry.

A

Customers, because oftentimes, the the titles and azure don't really reflect how people do their jobs, um also projects or if people have a specific certification. It's helpful to be able to know that about people within a team and then once tags are set up, you can actually at mention them um in a channel or you can use them to start a chat and then I'll just uh run two quick videos of showing you how to go ahead and set up the tag.

A

So within teams you just click on the dot dot, dot next to the team and then do manage tags and it'll. Take you into a menu, and here you can see, I've got a couple tags already configured, but if I want to go ahead and create a team say, for example, I'm the it admin but for some reason everybody always reaches out to me. Instead of the entire team, I would want to create potentially a tag for the it team.

A

So then, that way, when people go ahead and reach out to the it team, they're not just pinging one person and then pinging the next person, they can just kind of get everyone in the group. So the other way that we think about it. It's kind of like a shortcut at mentioning a bunch of individuals, but a shortcut for people who may often struggle to remember all of the members of a project team.

A

So then, if I am megan, for example- and I want to go ahead and let the it team know about something- I can kind of use the tag that was set up by the itt team and just kind of mention them within a channel post. And then what happens is is the it team will go ahead and get a notification and then, as a user.

A

If I see a tag in a channel post, I can hover over it and understand who the members are and then there's also that option to to start a chat with that tag. But I can also do that from the new chat, the new chat menu. If I want to start a chat with all the product managers, I can type out product and then it'll automatically expand to the members of that tag.

A

Right now and then I can go ahead and type out my message and then click send and then the people who are members of that tag will get the chat as if it were any other group chat. So I also want to kind of ground ourselves into. You know why tags are really helpful and why we've seen our customers use them.

A

First of all, they're, as I mentioned before, role-based work is a scenario where we see a lot of customers use tags when, when people kind of understand the role of a person, but they don't really know who's working um specifically for industries where you have either like a high churn rate or if you have rotational responsibilities like say, for example, if somebody is a safety officer and that's a rotational job for people who are certified in a warehouse, you know I would want to just be able to reach that person instead of walking all the way to the end of the floor and looking at a schedule and a billboard or something like that.

A

Another thing that's helpful is in within large teams, um it's kind of like the middle ground between not mentioning individual and not mentioning a channel. So it just helps you to really like target your communication.

A

If you have company-wide teams or large teams, in addition to that, if there's a cross-functional project team, where you want to kind of categorize a group with attributes and variables that are really outside of what you would know about a person- that's another good instance to create a tag and then the other reason is to identify an expert or an owner. And you know that's that's a for example. We actually use that in our team to contact the legal expert and um all right.

A

So now, let's, let's talk a little bit about um how this relates to the set of apis we're releasing one of the things that we have heard is that uh it's great, that you can kind of create tags and use that for targeted communication.

A

However, managing tags is is a little bit of a challenge today, because, um first of all, uh some some customers have their their preferences set up so that only the team owners can manage tags and that's kind of a burden on the team owners is being able to keep up with updates because, as you see in like that second bullet, there are changes that happen within a project group.

A

Within an organization people join teams, leave teams, so keeping membership up to date is something that can be a little tedious and then the third thing is that uh the data that people actually want to create tags for often exist in another system. So one of the things that our customers are really eager to do, um and you know we hope that there will be uh on this call.

A

Some people who build solutions for this is uh just taking data from one place and then being able to create a tag using that data that will always be up to date and um so very soon uh by next week. You should see this set of apis be available within beta, and so um you know, we've got uh two resource types.

A

There's the there's the teamwork tag, resource type, which represents the the tag in teams like similar to the it admin tag that I was showing a little bit earlier, and then we also have a different resource type that represents the membership of the tag and we're enabling credit operations.

A

And what we're really excited about is the ability for our customers and for y'all on the call to be able to sort of just automate a way to create create solutions where um you know, there's a tags that are being created from another system, either a certification system, or even from um from data that might exist um elsewhere outside of some of the the traditional systems.

A

The other thing to note is that for our first version, we're only supporting application context, we uh in the the things that are happening next, we are going to put in support for delegated permission, um we're also going to release some partial command lits and then, of course, um as I mentioned, we're going to go into beta next week or potentially as early as today.

A

The pr is uh is in right now to get that to get that released, um but eventually we'll we'll go ahead and and release beyond be it, um and with that I think we might actually wrap up just barely on time. um Thank you so much for for listening.

A

um The the documentation is available, so you can kind of go in and check out that new set of apis uh in this resource and then, if you want to learn a little bit more about using tags and teams, I'd also link the help article and then, last but not least, we always really appreciate hearing from you know the developer community on what else they'd like to see if there's something that you kind of see in tags, and you think it would be really interesting like please, please do add your request to user voice or um or reach out to me, and um thank you everyone for listening again and for your time, it's great to be on this call excellent, very cool, annie.

A