Last month saw lots of product releases, improvements, and newsworthy moments within the Microsoft Teams ecosystem.
- Microsoft Teams Custom Emoji: Making Custom Emojis for Teams
- How to Remove Emoticons from Microsoft Teams
- Top 5 Tips for Staying Secure in Teams
Microsoft Teams announced updates relating to chat and collaboration, meetings, Mesh in Teams, webinars, town halls, Teams Rooms and devices, and Teams Phone.
Some of the big Teams news from the last month includes the release of a unified Teams app, a new central hub for teams channels and chats, and speaker progress gaining general availability.
Chat and Collaboration
Time-based prompts are being added to Copilot in chat so that you can gain insights into a specific time period with phrases like “March 2022”, “last year”, “last month”, and “yesterday”.
Users sharing the same tenant can request to join a shared channel using the channel’s share link.
Channel cards can now provide users with a quick overview of channel information, such as channel description, team name, last activity time, and membership information.
Apps in group chats can be accessed alongside people working outside your organisation, which Microsoft says enhances collaboration and productivity.
Discover feeds can be shown or hidden via settings. The personalised Teams channel feed helps to keep users up to date on information relevant to them.
Meetings and Mesh
AI-generated notes and tasks are available for Government Community Cloud (GCC) customers as part of intelligent meeting recap. To use the feature, a Teams Premium GCC license or Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 GCC license is required.
Intelligent meeting recap lets unscheduled town hall participants with Android devices search meeting recordings by speaker name and topic title.
Mesh event hosts with a Teams Premium license can see raised hands and reactions throughout all rooms at multi-room events.
Webinars and Town Halls
Town hall participants can send and receive reactions, including “like”, “love”, “laugh”, “applause, and “surprised” to make it easy to display their reactions in real time. This capability is available in town halls for users with Teams Premium licenses.
Developers with any Teams license can add and remove webinars using new APIs, as well as register attendees to current webinars.
Town hall Graph APIs enable organisers to add and remove town hall events. A list of Town Hall Sessions is also accessible so that organisers can create and list presenters and create and update their profile photos.
Town hall attendee questions can be exported as a .CSV file following an event, which can be shared on a SharePoint site or with attendees via email.
Teams Rooms and Devices
Zoom meetings can be joined with an ID and passcode for organisations with Direct Guest Join meetings enabled for Teams Rooms on Android. A Teams Rooms Pro license is also required.
A Teams Rooms Pro license will also allow IT admins using Teams Rooms on Android to upload custom background images through the Teams admin centre.
IT admins on Teams Rooms can perform text and UI elements resizing on front-of-room displays by adjusting the display scaling settings.
Newly certified Teams devices this month are the Yealink CM20 Ceiling Audio System, the Logitech Rally Bar and Mic Pods for Teams Rooms on Windows, and the Yealink Teams Phone MP E2 series.
Teams Phone
Callers waiting in call queues can receive a callback to their phone number when an agent is available if they are eligible. Such eligibility is determined by admins who can set the necessary conditions that need to be met like surpassing a specific wait time, calls-to-agent ratio, or the number of calls in the queue.
August also saw UC Today’s Tom Wright joined by special guest Tom Arbuthnot from Empowering.Cloud to discuss major Teams news, such as Microsoft’s earnings for FY24 Q4, modern work insights, Teams devices updates, Teams client improvements, and more.
