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The Who...Teams App

Who is an App available for you to use in Teams that gives you the ability to search for anyone in your organization. At the time of writing this Who is at version 0.2 so features are likely to change. You may have noticed this app if you've ever clicked the ellipsis in Teams, or perhaps you didn't even know there are apps instead of Teams that you can use. The goal of this post will to get you familiar with Teams and hopefully give you a few reason to use it in your every day work lives.

For starters, what is Who? The app description states that you can "search for anyone in your organization based on what they're working on, who they work with, and more." However that does not provide a great explanation of all it can do. Yes, with Who you can search for people by attributes that have listed in their User Profile including their skills, manager, and also pull in details from the Graph such as the people they work. But the real value of who is how the information gets surfaced, the information is available in different ways via the 3 tabs at the top for Conversation, Your org, and Upcoming meetings.

To get started Who (as are many other apps such as the newly announced Shifts) is available via the Teams by click on the ellipsis. 

If this your first time accessing Who you will be prompted to grant the app permissions.

As mentioned above, once in Who you will noticed 3 tabs at the top for Conversations, Your Org, and Upcoming meetings.


The Conversations tab will let you chat with a bot to ask questions about and find people in your organization in common language, I have included a screenshot below of all of the queries you can start with but the three would like to call out are the "who have I emailed about"/"who was in the meeting about"/"who have I messaged about" as this really enhances the current search abilities found in outlook and the ones I find the most valuable.


Once you have returned a search for a user a card will pop up with the user information as well as some actions that you can take from sending them a chat or an email to furthering your query to find out more about the user through the buttons on the bottom.


Moving to the Your Org tab you can view and org chart of all of the users. Using the box in the top right you can search for a user or you can manually navigate the org chart to find the someone you are looking for.

From there you can drill into different aspects of a user and similar to above send them an email, initiate a call etc. Additionally from the fly out card you can actually send the user a chat in Teams without ever leaving the org chart view.



Finally, the Upcoming meetings tab taps into your calendar to show you your next 7 days worth of meetings. You can view information about the meeting such as the time and the subject but also all of the attendances both inside and outside your organization. Users in your organization will show their online status, while a user is outside your organization will be marked with a prohibition (do not enter) symbol. Additionally, users inside your organization will have the same experience as the organizational chart with fly out details about the user.


Personally, the meetings tab is my favorite functionality as I can easily see who will be in my meetings throughout they day in a single view without having to go from meeting invite to meeting invite. What's your favorite functional? Let me know on twitter @mslavieri

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