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.

Figure 1: The Teams mute mic button now works with 99.99+% reliability

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.

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