New Schedule Send Feature for Microsoft Teams

While perhaps a little late to the game, but a welcomed change nonetheless, Microsoft has officially rolled out a new schedule send feature for Microsoft Teams (reference).

You may be familiar with such features within platforms like Gmail and more recently, the popular messaging platform Slack.

Here are what this new feature means for your team and some of the best ways to utilize this new capability.

What is a “schedule send feature”? 

Are you ever working after hours or on a Sunday and wanting to send someone a message while you’re thinking about it without disturbing them after hours? Or, perhaps you work with team members in different time zones? It’s 4 o’clock your time, but 7 o’clock there, often making a Teams message inappropriate given the time of day. Enter the “schedule send feature.”

With the “schedule send feature,” you can write the aforementioned team member a message while you’re thinking of it and in your workflow, but schedule to have Teams messenger actually send the message to the person at a particular time and date in the future. For example, as they get to work, you want them to be notified of the message around 9 am local time. No problem, just select the day and 9 o’clock in their time zone. The message will then automatically be sent at that point in the future. Pretty great, right? 

It gets even better. Maybe there are two times in the next month when you need to do a casual check-in with a particular team member. Easy. Schedule a “how is x project coming along?” message within Teams to send at two dates and times next month. Now, you won’t have to think about it again until that team member replies back to you.

How to Use Schedule Send in Microsoft Teams

To use schedule send, simply compose your message like you normally would. Long press the send button until the option to ‘schedule’ appears. A pop-up window will appear where you’ll select the day and time you’d like to send your message. Once selected, click “send at scheduled time” to complete scheduling your message. 

3 Microsoft Teams Features We Love

Speaking of Microsoft Teams, here are our favorite three features (with number one an obvious addition). 

1. Schedule send feature–we have to include this one as our new favorite feature–the schedule send feature helps organizations with time zone coordination, planning, avoiding distractions, and follow-up.
2. Link documents–sending a Teams shared doc to a team member in a Teams message? Eliminate the long link by hyperlinking a certain word.
3. Tag team members–sending a group message but want to tag particular team members? Teams makes it easy to tag individual team member handles within a group (or individual) message. 

Microsoft 365 for Managed IT 

We are big fans of all things Microsoft 365. Why? As managed IT service providers, streamlining our clients onto one platform makes our job easier and us more effective. By operating within one software platform, like Microsoft 365, organizations reduce their IT infrastructure, thus reducing their cybersecurity risk. 

Interested in chatting about managed IT services for your business? With clients across Arizona, we service small to medium-sized businesses in various industries, including healthcare, accounting, law, small business, and more. Book a 15-minute discovery call with us today.