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Calendar Notifications Appear in Teams Activity Feed
Introduced by MC704955 (last updated 2 April 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 314355), after several weeks, I have come to the conclusion that I hate the calendar notifications that now arrive in the Teams activity feed. According to the deployment schedule, almost all tenants should have the feature by now.
Calendar notifications arrive for
- Meeting invitations (including channel meetings where the organizer sends personal invitations).
- Meeting updates, including cancellations.
- Meeting forwards (that the user organized).
Calendar events pop up as unread notifications in the activity feed, cluttering the feed that’s already heavily trafficked by @mentions, replies, invocations to renew expiring teams, and the like. In fact, I get two sets of notifications because Outlook notifies me about new invitations and updates too. At least, Outlook would if I had not configured its calendar long ago to accept invitations automatically.
Suppressing Calendar Notifications in Teams
The good news is that you can suppress calendar notifications in Teams too. If you hover over the timestamp for a calendar notification (like 16:22 in Figure 1), an ellipsis menu appears. Select the “turn off calendar” option and the activity feed becomes a more pleasant place again.
This experience reminds me once again of the value of paying attention to the notification settings in the Teams client. As obvious from this 2021 post, it’s an ongoing battle because new sources of notifications (like the calendar) appear over time.
“Turn off calendar” disables most calendar notifications in the settings app (Figure 2). It doesn’t disable notifications for when people forward meetings that you organize. You can turn that setting off too if you like.
Reduced Filters in the Activity Feed
After sorting out calendar notifications, let’s turn our attention to message center notification MC793967 (17 May 2024), a candidate for the worst written message center post of the year. This feature, rolling out to general availability soon, removes much of the filtering capability for the activity feed. Microsoft explains that they’re doing this “To solve for discoverability and ease of usage of @Mentions in activity” (whatever that means) by introducing two “selectable pills” (normal people call these “buttons”) to filter for @mention and unread notifications (Figure 3).
The other filters previously available are retired. These include replies, reactions, apps, and voicemail, all of which seem pretty useful. No doubt Microsoft’s wonderous telemetry will prove otherwise.
To replace the retired filters, Microsoft says “we recommend the utilization of upfront mentions pill, which address the bullseye of filtering needs in Activity feed.” I have no idea what this mangled attempt at an English sentence means. Surely Copilot could have rewritten the text for clarity and conciseness? You could interpret the words to mean that Microsoft believes that @mentions are the most important notifications for users (probably true) with unread a close second. Hence the two filter options.
It’s also worth noting that a secondary filter option exists. Press CTRL+Shift+F (Windows) or click the funnel icon and you can input some words to filter the current list of notifications. For instance, if the selected filter is for unread notifications and you input “Paul” as a filter, the activity feed shows you unread notifications from users with Paul in their display name and notifications with Paul in their text.
Cleaning up Teams
All of this is part of Microsoft’s efforts to clean up what had become a cluttered Teams client. They want the Teams 2.1 client to be easy to use with the most important elements highlighted to users. I’ve no problem with that aspiration, but it would be good if communication was better.
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When they enabled this notification for invites it coincided with some change on a Zoom side another team did, so first i was trying to find a setting in Zoom. Until someone pointed out to me this is actually setting in Teams. Yeah, i have disabled this as soon as i found the setting. I prefer Outlook to handle the invites (god forbid to use auto invite accept, so many sent out here for various events i don’t care). And if you accept it in Teams, it doesn’t affect same entry in Outlook. Weird. Also, i am already trained to expect a message or reaction in Teams when i see a badge number. Invites are just not that important to get active notification for.