Remind Bot for Microsoft Teams Review: A Productivity Essential for Teams Users

Adding value to your Teams’ productivity experience

Published: February 1, 2023

UC Today Team

The ability to set one-time or recurring reminders integrated into your workflows can make a significant difference to your productivity. It seems like a small detail, but it can save you the effort of switching apps, make collaboration easier, and ensure that you remember every minute detail of your workday. This is what’s enabled by a nifty little app called Remind by 88 Ventures, which is purpose-built for the Teams experience.

88 Ventures Limited was established in 2013 and registered in Hong Kong. The company builds functional, user-friendly tools for targeted use cases. Its portfolio includes MOONBEAR for Office 365, Beauty Booking for salon booking in the Taiwanese market, and services for building custom business apps. Within MOONBEAR, there are two apps – a payments bot and a Remind, which is a bot that helps to set reminders using a conversational interface on Microsoft Teams.

Remind is among the most popular reminder tools on the Microsoft app store, with a stellar average rating of 4.6/5 and a 5/5 rating by 79% of users. Interestingly, the feature mimics a capability you might already be used to in Slack: its native reminder functionality.

Let us review the Remind bot’s features in more detail.

Inside Remind for Microsoft Teams

Installing Remind is as easy as navigating the Microsoft Teams app store and looking up Remind by 88 Ventures. Keep in mind that you might need to configure administration policies before installing. Once the app is in place, it will appear on your main Teams navigation bar and automatically integrate with your chat and channel conversations.

Here is a quick review of the key features you can expect with Remind.

Bot-based interface – The flagship feature of Remind (which is what makes it so compelling) is the simple bot-based interface. You can tag Remind in any conversation and set a reminder for yourself or another user/channel using a @mention.
Simple command format – The template or format for setting reminders is straightforward – follow the @Remind [what] [when] structure, and modify it as necessary with the specific names of users, channels, and time zones.
Snooze and re-snooze – Remind lets you snooze reminders if you can’t address them immediately. This feature is available only for reminders that you set for yourself.
Recurring reminders – Another handy feature, recurring reminders can be set using the same @Remind [what] [when] format. The app is extremely intuitive and can help you set recurring reminders for every Monday, Tuesday, etc., for every weekday, every second to the last weekday of every month, and so on. You can check out the complete list of recurring reminder possibilities here.
Remind in a new conversation – By default, the Reminder app continues channel conversations from where it was left off, inserting the reminder into the current conversation flow. You can configure this to trigger a new conversation every time a reminder occurs by using the @Remind in the new convo [what] [when] command.
Multiple time zone support – In the [when] part of the reminder command, you can replace the simple time format with a time zone that is different from yours. The app defaults reminders as per your device time, but you can ask it to remind you of something at 3:30 pm IST, 10 am GMT, etc.
Multiple date and time format support – The app can understand you no matter which date and time format you use. You can set a reminder at an interval from the current time – e.g., @Remind “Call Rob” in 30 minutes. You can also set specific times as per a 12-hour or 24-hour clock. You can specify a date or a day.
Remind lists – The list feature displays all the reminders you have set and those scheduled for the future. You can access this feature using the @Remind list command, where you can delete reminders you don’t need, reply to reminders that are part of a conversation, mark reminders as complete, and much more.
Turn messages into reminders – After the Remind app is installed, a new option will appear when you click on the ⋯ icon while hovering over a message. From More actions, you can choose to Remind me about this, and the app will convert the message into a reminder.