Channel Digest

Produce a consolidated summary of activity across multiple Microsoft Teams channels. Scans recent messages from each channel, identifies key discussions, decisions made, action items, and @‑mentions — then presents everything in a single, scannable digest. Ideal for managers, leads, or anyone tracking multiple project channels.

When to Use

"What happened in my channels today?"
"Summarize the last 3 days across all my project channels"
"Give me a digest of Engineering and Product channels"
"Any decisions made in the team channels this week?"
"Channel digest for the sprint channels"
"What did I miss in the channels while I was out?"

Instructions

Step 1: Identify the User

workiq-ask_work_iq (
  question: "What is my profile information including display name, email, and time zone?"
)

Extract displayName, email, and timeZone.

Step 2: Discover Teams and Channels

List all teams and their channels:

workiq-ask_work_iq (
  question: "List all Microsoft Teams teams I belong to and their channels."
)

If the user specified particular channels (e.g., "Engineering #general and #design-reviews"), filter to only those. Otherwise, include all non‑archived channels across relevant teams.

Build a channel inventory:

Team name → Channel name
Skip channels named "General" in low‑priority teams unless the user explicitly includes them.

Step 3: Pull Recent Messages from Each Channel

For each target channel, fetch recent messages within the lookback window:

workiq-ask_work_iq (
  question: "Show me the last 30 messages in the '<channel name>' channel of the '<team name>' team including replies. For each message include the sender name, date and time, message content, reply count, any @mentions, reactions count, and any attachments or shared links."
)

For each message, capture:

Sender display name
Timestamp
Content (text body for analysis)
Reply count — indicates discussion depth
Mentions — anyone @‑mentioned, especially the current user
Reactions — high reaction count signals importance
Attachments — files or links shared

Step 4: Analyze and Categorize Messages

For each channel, classify the messages into categories:

🔑 Key Decisions — messages containing:

Decision language: "decided", "approved", "agreed", "going with", "finalized", "confirmed"
Follow‑up with context about what was decided

💬 Active Discussions — threads with:

3+ replies indicating substantive conversation
Multiple participants contributing
Ongoing debate or open questions

📌 Action Items — messages containing:

Task language: "action item", "TODO", "follow up", "need to", "can you", "please"
Assignments: "@person please…", "owned by…"
Deadlines: "by Friday", "due date", "EOD"

📢 Announcements — messages that are:

From team owners or managers
Posted with high importance
Information‑sharing without expecting discussion

📎 Shared Resources — messages with:

File attachments (documents, spreadsheets)
Links to external resources, PRs, or documents

👤 Your Mentions — messages where the current user was @‑mentioned or referenced by name.

Step 5: Search for User Mentions Across Channels

Cast a wider net for the user's mentions:

workiq-ask_work_iq (
  question: "Find all Teams channel messages that mention me or are directed at me in the last <lookback period>. Include the team name, channel name, sender, date, and message content for each."
)

Cross‑reference with messages already captured to avoid duplicates. Add any new mentions to the Your Mentions category.

Step 6: Compile the Consolidated Digest

Organize findings by channel, then surface cross‑channel themes at the top.

Output Format

📰 CHANNEL DIGEST
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📅 Period: {start date} → {end date}
🔍 Channels scanned: {N}  ·  💬 Messages analyzed: {N}

🎯 CROSS‑CHANNEL HIGHLIGHTS
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🔑 {N} decisions made  ·  📌 {N} action items  ·  👤 {N} times you were mentioned

Top Decisions:
  1. {Team} › #{Channel}: "{decision summary}" — {Person}, {date}
  2. {Team} › #{Channel}: "{decision summary}" — {Person}, {date}

Action Items Needing You:
  • {Person} in #{Channel}: "{action item}" — due {date}
  • {Person} in #{Channel}: "{action item}"

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📢 {Team Name} › #{Channel Name}
   💬 {N} messages  ·  🧵 {N} threads  ·  👥 {N} participants
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

   🔑 DECISIONS
   • "{Decision summary}" — {Person}, {date}

   💬 KEY DISCUSSIONS
   • "{Topic summary}" — {N} replies, {participants}
     └─ Status: {resolved / ongoing / needs input}

   📌 ACTION ITEMS
   • {Person}: "{task description}" — {due date or "no deadline"}

   📢 ANNOUNCEMENTS
   • {Person}: "{announcement summary}" — {date}

   📎 SHARED FILES
   • {filename} — shared by {Person}, {date}

   👤 YOUR MENTIONS
   • {Person}: "@you {message preview}" — {date}

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📢 {Team Name} › #{Channel Name}
   💬 {N} messages  ·  ⏸️ Low activity
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
   • {brief summary of the few messages}

🔇 QUIET CHANNELS (no messages in period)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
   • {Team} › #{Channel}
   • {Team} › #{Channel}

Parameters

Parameter	Required	Default	Description
Lookback	No	24 hours	Time window to scan (e.g., "3 days", "this week")
Teams	No	All user's teams	Specific teams to include
Channels	No	All channels	Specific channels to include
Focus	No	All categories	Filter to "decisions", "action-items", or "mentions"
Include Quiet	No	true	Whether to list channels with no activity
Max Messages	No	30 per channel	Maximum messages to pull per channel

Required MCP Tools

MCP Server	Tool	Purpose
workiq (Local WorkIQ CLI)	`ask_work_iq`	User identity, team/channel discovery, message retrieval, and mention search

Tips

Say "digest for Engineering channels only" to narrow the scope and speed up results.
Use "channel digest for the last week" before a Monday planning meeting to see what happened while you were out.
Use action-item-extractor to pull action items from meeting content after reviewing channel activity.
For recurring digests, establish a cadence: "give me my channel digest every morning."
Ask "expand on the discussion in #{Channel}" to drill into a specific conversation with full context.

Examples

Example 1 — Morning standup prep (default 24-hour window)

"Give me a channel digest for today."

Scans all of the user's Teams channels for the past 24 hours, surfaces any decisions made overnight, flags action items assigned to the user, and lists @-mentions — all in a single digest organized by team and channel.

Example 2 — Catch up after time off (multi-day, scoped channels)

"Channel digest for the Engineering and Product channels over the last 5 days."

Limits the scan to channels in the Engineering and Product teams, pulls up to 30 messages per channel across the 5-day window, and highlights key decisions (e.g., architecture choices, scope changes), active threads, and any messages that mentioned the user while they were away.

Example 3 — Decision-focused digest before a planning meeting

"Show me only decisions and action items from the sprint channels this week."

Uses the Focus parameter to filter output to Key Decisions and Action Items only, skipping announcements and low-activity channel summaries. Ideal for quickly building a pre-meeting agenda from what was agreed or assigned across sprint-related channels.

Error Handling

No teams or channels found

ask_work_iq returns an empty result if the user is not a member of any team, or if the account lacks access to the Teams API.
Resolution: Confirm the user's account has Microsoft Teams access and is a member of at least one team. Ask the user to specify a team name manually if discovery fails.

Channel message fetch returns empty or partial results

ask_work_iq may return fewer messages than expected if the channel has low activity or if the lookback window predates available message history (Teams message retention policies vary).
Resolution: Proceed with available messages and note in the digest that history may be limited. Surface "No messages in period" for those channels in the Quiet Channels section rather than failing silently.

Permission denied on a channel

Private channels require explicit membership; ask_work_iq will indicate an access error if the user is not a member of a private channel even within a team they belong to.
Resolution: Skip the inaccessible channel, log it as "access restricted" in the digest output, and continue processing remaining channels.

Search for mentions returns no results

The mentions query via ask_work_iq may return empty results for broad queries or large tenants.
Resolution: Fall back to the mentions already captured during the per-channel message retrieval. Note that the mention search could not be completed so the Your Mentions section may be incomplete.

Slow responses with many channels

Querying messages from a large number of channels requires multiple ask_work_iq calls and may be slow.
Resolution: Process channels in batches. Inform the user of the delay and suggest narrowing scope with the Teams or Channels parameters.

channel-digest