4th MVP award 🥰 (and how to set your Quiet time/DnD in Teams / Office 365 for vacation!)

Tuesday evening I got the information I was renewed as MVP for my 4rd year. I am extremely happy and very honored about this! Being a Microsoft MVP has been great experience, because the community rocks! Sharing knowledge and insights, having fun and making new friends, meeting people in person at events and impacting & helping numerous people by the work done at the community. Big thank you for all of you everyone in the community like my good friends & partners in the Metaverse One (and in Teams Nation earlier) Chris Hoard, Matti Paukkonen, Adam Deltinger, Chris Webb and Paul Dredge and of course countless others friends in the community! Special thanks to Microsoft Teams PG and especially Laurie Pottmeyer who is taking care of us “Teams MVPs”.

This year (Microsoft’s new year begins on 1st of July ) the old category Office Apps & Services got a new name M365 Apps & Services to tell about the broader scope it holds inside it.

How is my year 2022 looking so far ?

⭐Spoke publicly in 27 different occasions during six months.
🤩 Speaker at Microsoft Microsoft Teams Summit 2022 and Microsoft Build 2022
🤘 Speaker in 5 in person events
✅ was one of the main organizers Teams Nation Community Conference 2022 in which we had 3000 – 3500 online attendees during the day, 140 sessions and 180 speakers
✍ wrote almost 40 blog posts here and several posts to other blogs

You can find my upcoming speaking schedule in the Live Speaking Schedule page

Live schedule

Get Inspired!

There are of course lots of things happening around Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Cloud during this summer. You don’t want to miss Microsoft Inspire if you are a business person or a Microsoft Partner. This is the event that will do some announcements and brings news on various products and highlights for Microsoft’s fiscal year 2023. Registration is already open and you can build your Inspire schedule. A lot of Team’s features will be coming out during July – and I am sure Microsoft Inspire will have surprises for us (they always do). I will be on vacation, so I will catch sessions later in on-demand.

Prepare your Microsoft Teams for vacation: turn on Quiet hours

Since it is good to remind people what options are to enjoy a good vacation, I have added to this post my last year’s instructions (with bit of updates) on how to enable Quiet hours in Teams and Outlook. In the future we can do this in Viva Insights – that is rolling out during summer so it will be a bit late for my vacation period.

Of course you can choose to sign-out of Microsoft Teams during the vacation and remove your Office 365 account from your phone (or at least turn off email syncing) but there are other alternatives to this. Especially if you know you that you may have to take some action during your vacation. Or that suits you better. What I do, is that I turn on Teams Quiet Hours, set Out of Office and turn on Outlook mobile to Do not Disturb. I am not removing my Teams icon from my mobile’s front screen but this is not because of work but because I have other tenants I use – for example in MVP interactions. However – I want to set Quiet Hours so that I don’t receive notifications but instead I do my best to reduce the feeling of urgency and also checks “if there is something new out there”. I know it will take at least a week (or even two) for me to wind-down from actively doing checks..

How to turn on Quiet Hours in Microsoft Teams

As a reminder, you can set Quiet Hours on Teams mobile by going to notifications.

In notifications you can see during quiet time. The magic happens there.

turn on Quiet Days and select all days

**TIP:** You may want to **turn off also Badge counts** so you don’t have the nagging feeling to check on what’s new in Microsoft Teams..

How to turn on Do Not Disturb in Outlook Mobile client for all accounts

While at that – why not quiet Outlook notifications as well? Open Outlook mobile and look for the bell in account. This muting needs to be done for each account you want to mute – obviously it is time to mute the work account!
The benefit is that I can still access my work calendar – there are some personal reservations (it is my default calendar) so I want to stay on track about those. I do remove myself from all recurring meetings that happen during my vacation so I don’t get notified about them.

Make sure you have All Accounts selected and then tap on the Alarm Clock icon.

**TIP:** If you don’t want to do this to all accounts you can also do this per account. Just tap on the left vertical menu for the account you want to apply Do Not Disturb and click the Alarm Clock icon there.

In the screen “behind the alarm clock” you can set Outlook to Do not disturb.

Choosing “Until I turn it off” is a good and quick option. Don’t worry – you will eventually remember to turn it back on after the vacation.

Set Out of Office in Microsoft Teams

And finally you want to set Out of Office so that Teams shows your colleagues that you are not working. Teams and Outlook sync these settings so it is enough to do the setting in one place – it will be automatically reflected on the other one. We of course start this with Teams.

Open Teams and under to the top-right … menu click Settings.

Click on Schedule on Out of Office section.

Click on Turn on automatic replies to turn it on.

Set and check you have automatic replies on first. Then you can then set the message to your organization’s internal users and if you check the box on Send replies outside my organization you can customize the message others (outside your organization).

Lastly you want to check replies only during a time period to be able to set dates and times when this Out of Office is effective Finally Click on Save..

Now you can see that Out of Office has been scheduled.

How do you know this is on at Outlook as well? You can open Outlook and check out settings even in web version.

On top right at Outlook web you can go ahead search for automatic replies in settings. Open it by clicking on search result Automatic replies.

You are instantly teleported to Automatic replies page. In here you can see Out of Office has been set. You can also check Block my calendar for this period, Automatically decline new invitations and even automatically Decline and cancel all meetings that has been scheduled for your vacation time. This saves the time to remove them individually.

If you can, check out To Do and Outlook and get everything done, schedule them to the time after the vacation and try to get your inbox to 0 (empty of emails) before logging out. It will help your mind to forget those as well.

Set Microsoft Teams Status Message

You can also set a status message for your Teams. It will be displayed for your colleagues when they try to send you a chat or atmention you on channels. This feature is useful outside of vacations as well.

*Yes, I just updated my profile picture!*

You can set the status message by clicking on your profile picture and from there you can find Set status message.

I tend to use No Hello url in my status, to remind people not to send just Hi/Hello/Wassap messages but also to include the summary what the message is all about. As you can see you can set the Out of Office from this dialogue also!

Don’t forget to set also the status message clear date. It is on default after Today (as you can see in the picture above).

Then remember to check the box on Show when people message me to make sure they get your status message.

After hitting Done you can see your status and it’s end date (which can be conviniently the end date for your vacation)

This is how it looks for people who try to message or atMention you

First, the private chat message sending.

And if you are atMentioned on a channel they will see:

Turn off Viva Insights notifications

These notification don’t get through Microsoft Teams Quiet hours but you don’t want to have those extra unnecessary 60-90 notifications waiting for you when you come back.

I strongly recommend turning off reminders to Viva Insights for Virtual commute, Reflection and Praise for your vacation time. You only end up having unnecessary notifications in your Teams that make it more difficult to find out the real notifications you want to check after your vacation, when you are back at work.

Also: it is good to check Microsoft Teams Notifications in overall and turn off at least team & channel, likes and any other secondary (well, not related to you directly) notifications. You might want to leave just direct atMentions so you have less to go through after the vacation but you can then take action on those important topics.

You are now ready for vacation from Microsoft Teams / Office 365 perspective. You might want to consider turning off notifications on social media accounts as well. And stop the email sync on HoloLens 2 and other devices if you plan to use them for recreation during your vacation.