Lately, for my engineering projects, I’ve been creating “project dashboards” in OneNote for colleagues to find all of the key information, contacts and documents for the project.
I wanted to be able to link the names of key people directly to a chat window in Microsoft Teams to that you can just start chatting with them immediately.
I found a few guides online which recommend a URL scheme utilising https://teams.microsoft.com. I tested it out and it does indeed work, but it does so by opening a browser window first. Not only does this add to the delay, but it means opening extraneous tabs which need to be closed again. Since I’m all about efficiency, I wanted to find a way around that.
The solution was simply to change the protocol in the URL scheme to msteams://. This does have the disadvantage of meaning that it won’t work unless the user has Teams installed, but since in our organisation everyone has the software, it wasn’t a big deal.
Thus, to create a link directly to a chat with someone in Microsoft Teams, use the following URL scheme:
msteams://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/[email protected]&topicName=Project%20Namewhere you list out the users to start the chat with in the users var and what the chat is about in the topicName var. You can add multiple people to chat with using a comma-separated list.
P.S. you may encounter a pesky notice about the msteams:// protocol being potentially unsafe. To circumvent that and add msteams:// as a trusted protocol, follow this guide.
