Microsoft Teams is stealing this excellent feature from Slack

Microsoft Teams will soon make it easy to ping a specific group of people within a channel. An upcoming feature will allow people to assign people to tags within a team. A person can then mention a tag within a channel to ping that specific group of people.

Here’s the full description from the Microsoft 365 roadmap:

This set of APIs can be used to programmatically assign users tags in a team, making tag creation and maintenance faster and easier. Tags in Teams let users quickly reach a group of people without having to @mention or type out everyone individually. Users can use tags to start a chat or by @mentioning a tag in a channel post. For more information on tag in teams, see Using tags in Teams. Using these new APIs, developers can now: create tags in a team and assign users, get a list of tags in a team, update tags or delete tags.

As is the case with all features on the Microsoft 365 roadmap, its release date is subject to change.

Slack already supports a feature like this, so it will be a welcome addition to Teams. While Teams allows you to create channels, sometimes people want a message an entire channel while only pinging a specific group of people. This new feature will make that easy to do.