M365 Changelog: Task publishing – Teams activity feed items for all team members/owners when an urgent task is published to their team
MC531736 – What’s changing: In response to numerous customer requests, we’re improving visibility when an urgent task is published to a Microsoft Teams Team. After this feature is rolled out, when an organization uses the task publishing feature to publish a task with a priority set to Urgent, each member or owner of the team that receives this task will receive a Teams activity feed informing them that an urgent task was published to their team. This will ensure greater visibility for the time-sensitive urgent tasks, such as product recalls that need to be acted upon at multiple locations as soon as possible. This will not affect when a user creates an urgent task in the Planner app for their own team. This change in notification activity is specific to the special task publishing functionality which must be enabled by an admin.
What is task publishing: The task publishing feature is designed for frontline organizations that need work to be completed across distinct locations (such as stores, clinics, factories, branches). Task publishing allows business leaders to centrally define a set of tasks to be completed and distribute a copy of those tasks to tens, hundreds, or thousands of teams across your organization. Frontline organizations can also monitor the status of the work during execution. Visit the task publishing documentation to see a video overview of the feature. You can also view the instructions to set up task publishing for more information.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: 117573
When this will happen:
We expect to roll out this feature beginning late March, and we expect to complete by mid-April.
How this will affect your organization:
Your organization will not be impacted if 1. task publishing hasn’t been enabled in Microsoft Teams; or 2. you do not publish any tasks with the priority set to Urgent.
If you publish a task with priority set to Urgent, the team members or owner of each team that receives the task will also receive a Teams activity feed notification on the urgency, which will increase awareness that an urgent task needs to be completed.
What you need to do to prepare:
There is no preparation required, although you may wish to review your organization’s task publishing settings.