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Notify When Available Tracks the Availability of Other Users
Usually, the Teams developers can be criticized for informing customers about new features a long time in advance of actual availability. In a change to normal practice, Microsoft published message center notification MC797120 about the Notify when available feature for the new Teams client on May 30 and observed that they had been rolling out the feature to targeted release tenants since mid-May. General release tenants should see the feature showing up any date now because worldwide general deployment is scheduled to complete in early June.
Possibly the reason why Microsoft went ahead and released Notify when available feature without any warning is that this functionality exists in the old Teams client but not in the new 2.1 client (see “Features that are changing in the new Teams”). Users had complained about the loss of the feature (here’s an example of one of many questions on the topic from the Microsoft Answers forum). Releasing Notify when available removes one more thing off the “Make Teams 2.1 complete” list. I hope Microsoft moves on to restore the save messages option soon.
What Notify When Available Does
Notify when available is a mechanism to tell Teams that you’re interested in knowing when the presence status for another user changes to available. The kind of scenario that this feature is useful in is when you know that someone is going to be heavily committed to other tasks during a day, but you need to speak to them for a moment.
Taking out a subscription on their presence status makes Teams aware that you want to know when the person changes their presence to available. When that happens, Teams sends a notification that the person is now available and it’s up to you to reach out and contact them.
Using Notify When Available
The easiest way to know when someone is available is to find the person you want to communicate with in your chat list (not in a popped-out chat window). Perhaps they’re available now, in which case you can connect, or it will be like the situation shown in Figure 1 where Sean Landy is busy. To create the subscription, select Notify when available from the […] menu.
Once a subscription is in place, you’ll continue to receive a notification (Figure 2) each time the user changes their presence status to available.
Because Teams monitors the presence status for the account, the change to “Available” is detected immediately, and the notification arrives soon afterward. Changes in presence to other states like Busy, Appear offline, etc. do not generate a notification.
Disabling Notifications
Although it’s possible to leave a subscription in place permanently and continue to receive notifications when someone is available, most people only need to be notified once or twice. To remove a subscription, open the […] menu for the user and select Turn off notifications.
To view all subscriptions currently active, go to the People section in Notifications settings in the Teams Settings app (Figure 2). You can now turn off whichever subscription you’re no longer interested in contacting or add subscriptions for some new people.
To stop receiving notifications, you can turn them off in your app settings (#2 above).
For the record, here’s the Microsoft support article for the Notify when available feature.
Transitions are Hard
There’s no doubt that transitions are hard, especially for client software that’s packed full of features accumulated over years. In that light, Microsoft has done a reasonable job of replaced the original Teams client with Teams 2.1. Certainly, they’re in a place that the new Outlook for Windows developers would like to be, a larger installed base transitioned and most people happy. I wonder will the situation be the same when Microsoft eventually retires Outlook classic in 2029?
So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.
This reminded me when years ago we have switched to Skype for Business and it enabled Notify for presence changes for all users reporting to the same manager by default. It is puzzling why it has to be a permanent subscription. Usually you would only want to catch a person available just once. Default should always have been a one time subscription, in my opinion.