Here’s What’s New in Microsoft Teams in September 2020

Last month, team collaboration giant Microsoft introduced ‘Coordinated Meetings,’ a feature that enables you to use Microsoft Teams Rooms and Surface Hubs in the same space. “Yes, some people are fancy enough to have both MTR’s and Surface Hubs in the same space,” commented Microsoft MVP, Tom Arbuthnot, on his popular Tom Talks blog.

He called the move by Microsoft an interesting one, adding because the Surface Hub can join Teams meetings with audio and video, it’s not only cool but practical, too. “But it’s not a meeting room device.” It does, yet, run on a unique operating system, “this means it doesn’t/can’t run the MTR app and have MTR certified Audio and Video devices plugged straight in.”

Arbuthnot noted, there are use cases in which both solutions would get deployed in the same space. “Coordinated Meetings, otherwise known as “better together” for MTR’s and Surface Hubs lets you set up Teams Rooms and Surface Hubs so that when you join a meeting on either device.”

Users can join other devices in a room with the same meeting and work together. Offering up tips on how to best use the features, Arbuthnot wrote, how you configure which devices do what depends on your environment. He does recommend taking the following actions to ensure the best possible experience. Use the microphone from Teams Room devices, which is set to ‘on’ by default, according to Arbuthnot. Via the Surface Hub, the feature’s set to off by default but can get activated by participants. Leverage the Whiteboard technology from Microsoft’s Surface Hub – his final recommendation.

“You could configure them if you prefer, but in most cases, the MTR will have a better camera and microphones and get positioned better.” If you want to find out more, check out Microsoft’s whitepaper on how to set up coordinated meetings with Microsoft Teams Rooms and Surface Hub.

More recently, Microsoft made its new app ‘Microsoft Lists’ generally available as an add-on. The new Lists app, fresh to the team collaboration platform – is a feature announced at Build 2020. Now available for all Microsoft 365 commercial and government community (GCC) customers, the app helps track info that’s built on the Microsoft Teams platform. Among the app’s features are five key components that consist of the following:

Users can create lists from scratch, from templates, from Excel table data, and existing lists. In total, there are eight standard templates and three industry-specific ones. Importing existing team lists as new tabs is another key functionality. And all standard list features are accessible via SharePoint web: column types, view formatting, Quick Edit, exporting to Excel, sorting, filtering, and more. Users can have channel conversations about list items, and each user action gets tracked/made available in the app’s security and compliance centre.

Stay tuned for the latest Microsoft Teams news, as we bring you the industry’s breaking stories, feature updates, and virtual conference coverage. What’s your take on Microsoft’s latest innovations to its popular Teams platform? How does your organization leverage these functionalities?

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