Managing DND or Focus settings for minimizing distractions in classrooms - Education

Question

Our teaching community is concerned about students getting distracted in classrooms due to notifications from Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and other apps. While we can use DND or Focus to disable these notifications, certain Teams and Outlook notifications still get through. We could potentially tweak DND settings to address those.

However, this solution needs to be implemented on each device, which isn't practical with over 2000 students. Does Microsoft [Education] have a solution to manage DND settings, such as a machine policy and/or a scheduler that can turn it on/off or trigger Focus based on a timetable/calendar status?

If there is no easy solution, could a PowerShell script be used to make changes to DND or Focus on a device? This could help if we can schedule it to run for a select group or devices.

Answer 1

Hi @Melvin Jose

As my current knowledge, there isn’t a direct way to manage Do Not Disturb (DND) or Focus settings across multiple devices using any Microsoft Education solution.

To get this feature more quickly, you can send a feedback directly to Microsoft Feedback to add it in future updates.

Many features of our current products are designed and upgraded based on customers’ feedback. With requirements like this increase, the problem may well be released in the future.

You can also set which types of notifications will not be displayed in Teams settings (although these methods only apply to individual users and not to all users at once):

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