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Who Thought that Including Metadata in Teams Pasted Text Was a Good Idea?
In an example of finally listening to user feedback, Microsoft announced in MC878422 (30 August 2024) that Teams no longer includes metadata in messages copied from chats or channel conversations. The change is effective now and means that instead of having Teams insert a timestamp and the name of the person who created the text, only the text is pasted. This is exactly the way the feature should have worked since day zero. Quite why anyone thought it was a good idea to insert additional information into copied text is one of the great mysteries of Teams development.
MC878422 notes: “Many users have voiced frustrations over copying messages in Teams, particularly the inclusion of metadata like names and timestamps. Customer feedback has been clear, signaling that this feature was adding more noise than value to user workflow.”
Copying Metadata is An Old Lync Feature
It seems likely that inserting the timestamp and author name is an idea that came to Teams from Lync Server 2013 and Skype for Business. A support article from the time describes how to change the default setting of copying message, name, and time to copying just the message. Nearly eight years after Teams entered preview in November 2016, the opportunity to update a setting as in Lync Server 2013 never appeared. The net result is that Teams users had to manually remove the unwanted metadata from copied text after pasting it into another app. Thankfully, the change “helps maintain focus and reduces unnecessary noise.”
I’ve no idea about how many of the 320 million monthly active Teams users found this aspect of the product annoying, but it’s been high up on my list along with in-product advertising and a constant stream of irritating pop-up messages.
Mic Pending is a Feature You Probably Never Knew Exists
In a more positive note, Juan Rivera, Corporate Vice President @ Microsoft. Teams Calling, Meetings & Devices Engineering posted on LinkedIn about a feature called Mic Pending state, which apparently is now rolled out to all tenants.
I have never thought much about the process required to implement the mute/unmute button in a call, but apparently Microsoft has done the work to make sure that when users hit the mic button (Figure 1), the action occurs immediately. If something gets in the way to prevent mute/unmute happening, Teams displays a “pending” icon if it notices that the action has taken more than 100 milliseconds.
The issue being addressed is to make sure that people have confidence that Teams will mute their microphone immediately they press the button and unmute the microphone in a similarly effective manner. It seems like some folks have been caught by a delay in muting. The button displayed in a Teams meeting showed that the microphone was off when it was still live. You can see how this could end up with something being heard or captured on a Teams recording that people would have preferred not to have been captured. Calling your boss a flaming idiot over an open microphone that you thought was muted is possibly not a good thing to do.
According to the post, Microsoft believe that Teams delivers 99.99+% reliability for the mute/unmute toggle, which should mean that the status for the microphone shown on screen can be trusted. Of course, the paranoid amongst us will always give a microphone two or three seconds before we consider it to be truly off.
Two Good Changes
The one thing about Teams is that it’s always changing. People like the Office 365 for IT Pros writing team have no shortage of topics to cover when it comes to Teams. Thankfully, the two topics covered here are both positive, even if mic pending hasn’t come to our attention before.
Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
The change to copied messages (MC878422) is another great example of making a requested change in the most frustrating way possible… by making it a wholesale change that pisses off the people that need the behaviour to remain constant.
Any change to existing behaviour should always be implemented as an option.
I disagree that the new behaviour should always have been this way. I would argue that it should be message-only if copying a single message, or even messages from a single user… but when copying a conversation there is no longer any indication of who said what, which means it’s no longer possible to copy/paste into case notes.
The problem with a noisy request like MC878422 is that there’s no easy way to argue in favour of the status quo. Making it an option would have allowed telemetry to give a real picture.
An option might have been a safer way to deploy the change, but it seems like from the comments and user requests that people just didn’t like the metadata…
The problem with the chorus of voices saying they didn’t like it is that it could well have just been a noisy minority. All that was ever visible until now was one side of the argument.
Why would anyone who was OK with the old behaviour even think to seek out those conversations to argue in favour of the (now former) status quo?
Well, it’s true that people who are pleased with an implementation seldom voice an opinion. However, the folks who were not happy complained at length to Microsoft in the feedback forum, Reddit, Microsoft forums, and so on. I hated the implementation myself and heard many other MVPs voice a concern that a problem existed. So Microsoft changed. Maybe you should register a feedback forum request to add a setting to control whether metadata is included when pasting.
I made a support ticket with Microsoft because they snuck this change in without any notification to Teams Admins. I was told about this change before it was announced and additionally was told they tried to make a toggle to have the metadata stay, but it caused too many issues than good.
In my opinion, Microsoft is getting lazy. No heads up notice to admins. Developers declaring it’s too hard to add an option. I expect much more from Microsoft.
How can an archived conversation without the meta data “who/when” be beneficial at all?
Without the meta data the resulting conversation “protocol” just looks like a messy text,
not really reflecting the real contents / meaning of the original conversation.
Above I read something like “The who/when data was adding more noise than value to user workflow” – I totally disagree.
Where is the noise???
The metadata included in pasted text was the noise. People just didn’t like it and Microsoft received lots of feedback that including the metadata was unpopular. So they removed it.
In my opinion, 56 upvotes is not “lots of feedback”, while they ignore feedback with hundreds if not over a thousand upvotes. They’re ridiculous.